


walked in the wildwood

by SunflowerSales



Series: that kind of voyage & related stories [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Canon-Typical Violence, Female Uchiha Sasuke, Gen, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, POV Female Character, POV Hatake Kakashi, technically you don't need to read the original story but it helps
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-04
Updated: 2018-02-10
Packaged: 2019-03-13 13:41:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 27,688
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13571730
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SunflowerSales/pseuds/SunflowerSales
Summary: Team Seven, year 98, consists of the Konoha jinchuriki, a civilian's daughter, and the little girl Uchiha Itachi drove insane.Kakashi doesn't know what he did to deserve this, but he handles the situation the best he can.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So, I clearly promised a follow-up story ages ago, but then I moved across the country for work, and then halfway across for school, so things kind of got away from me. I also thought I lost this at some point, only recently rediscovered it, and didn't want to post it until I finished. 
> 
> Here you go, guys. I hope it was worth the wait.
> 
> Oh, and on the off chance that anyone new is actually coming into this story, pay attention to the warning in the tags. 
> 
> (also I did start writing that HP AU...then this happened instead)

Umino Iruka slaps a file down on the countertop one Monday night in late July, when even the dark refuses to provide a respite from the heat and sticky humidity. In an effort to escape the summer air and the overwhelming reality of what this time of year means, Kakashi planned to spend his evening drinking at the corner bar by his apartment. Asuma half-promised he’d join, but that’s thirty minutes from now. Kakashi himself just arrived. Already the place is packed full of the usual patrons, of which Iruka, meddling Academy instructor, isn’t one.

As he says, “We need to talk,” Kakashi glances down at the folder, and more specifically at the labeled flap, where  _ Uchiha Sasuke  _ is scribbled in scratchy, faded handwriting. “She’s going to graduate in a couple of weeks, and you’re going to get her.”

Five years ago, he lead an ANBU mission into Kuso with Uchiha Itachi as his second-in-command. Six years before that, Rin gave Kakashi Uchiha Obito’s eye. It would be a lie to say Kakashi hasn’t thought of the girl and how she’s coping every once in a while in the past few years, but he doesn’t want her on his team.

Iruka frowns when Kakashi tears his eyes away from her name, so the downward turn of his lips mimics the scar across the bridge of his nose. To the right of him, a man and woman sit close on a couple of stools, crowded together and whispering into each other’s necks. A blonde woman in a short black dress smokes a cigarette steadily not far down, flirting with Hideki the bartender, who furiously cleans the same glass. Last night, Kakashi returned from a short mission not far from the village walls, and before that he was sick; this is his first chance to relax in weeks. He doesn’t want Iruka and talk of the Uchiha family to ruin it.

“It doesn’t matter if she graduates,” he says, looking down again at the closed file as he rotates his glass on the counter. “She still needs to pass my test. No one’s passed it yet.”

“ _ Two  _ teams haven’t passed,” Iruka says, rolling his eyes, and sighs. “But no, that’s the problem. I mean, we’re friends, right? You know I don’t play favorites?”

While Kakashi thinks they’re more  _ friendly  _ than genuine friends, he still says, “Yeah, and?” He knows already what the other man’s going to ask, and doesn’t appreciate it.

The front door opens with a loud  _ bang _ , but it’s only Jori, the local grocer who lives two apartments directly below Kakashi. As Iruka takes a deep breath, dramatic as always, Jori’s card team cheers from their corner table and calls him over.

“She won’t pass,” Iruka says. “She’s—I don’t know. Depressed.”

“Oh, wow. I wonder why.”

“No, that’s not it,” he says, tapping his fingers on the table. “That’s why I brought the file. Apparently she wasn’t this bad until a couple of years ago. She went from being top of the class to…I think her ranking is number twelve?”

That’s enough to catch Kakashi’s attention, because as far as he knows, the last member of her family to have any score lower than perfect was her long dead cousin. Iruka continues, “There’s a girl I think she was friends with,” as Kakashi opens the file. Mostly it’s just a series of her bi-yearly evaluations, showing repeatedly that her worst score is teamwork, which is why her instructor goes on about how maybe working with this girl she might have been friends with once will help her pass naturally, but it’s no guarantee.

At the back of the file is the mental health assessment, which the primary instructor draws up as a final evaluation to deem if a potential graduate is ready to enter the field.  _ Sasuke shows early signs of depression _ , it says, followed by a tacked on note from a female instructor detailing how her personality abruptly changed in Year 3.  _ Sasuke lost interest in her personal goals, school activities, and social life.  _ She was nine in Year 3, which two full years after Itachi killed their family.

Usually parents meddle, and orphans are left to the wayside, but Iruka’s heart bleeds for the disenfranchised. “There are other students whose graduations I need to worry about,” he says. “This year’s got its ups and its way downs. But Sasuke is very skilled, and very smart, even if she doesn’t always apply either. I wouldn’t ask, but obviously she’s getting put with you, and I’m pretty sure she’ll fail.”

“This is more than your usual amount of worry,” Kakashi says, flipping back to Year 3. Sometime between the first evaluation and the second, she dropped from first place to sixth. “I’m guessing you have a theory.”

“Sasuke has panic attacks,” Iruka says carefully. “I need to watch who I pair her with for a fight to make sure her opponent can’t get her on the ground…and she went home sick for the first time in her entire school career during this year’s rape seminar.”

Kakashi finishes his drink. The graduation year rape seminar’s been going on since long before he was in the Academy. “Fuck,” he says. “Any proof?”

Shaking his head, Iruka says, “No, but there was that dead guy in the alley who showed up a few years back around the same time her scores dropped. Look, I’m not asking any of this because I think she deserves to pass out of pity or anything. She deserves it because she’s easily the best in her year, if not the surrounding few. She just needs a little help getting there.”

“And you think  _ I’m  _ the one to do it?” If she needs special training when she develops the Sharingan, then Kakashi can provide it, but he isn’t equipped to handle a normal team, let alone the emotionally damaged cousin of one of his deceased best friends.

“Not really,” the other man says with another frown. “But the Sandaime assigns the teams. We both know you’re getting her. I just want you to know to be careful with her.”

Kakashi doesn’t believe in preferential treatment or favoritism, or allowing someone to supersede to rules, but he thinks about Itachi in the ANBU training room saying, “I’m pretty sure my little sister _enjoys_ chores,” to another member who wouldn’t stop bitching about her younger brother shirking his lawn mowing duties. After the massacre—after every one of his team member’s psych eval requests went ignored—everyone said he snapped. That he couldn’t handle the work. When the frenzied search came to a halt because of dead lead after dead lead, Kakashi followed the story of the aftermath long enough to know the little sister who enjoyed doing chores wasn’t supposed to wake from her coma, and then did.

Ultimately, Iruka’s right, and the Sandaime will assign her to Kakashi’s Team Seven. That’s a cruel sort of irony there. A new Uchiha on a new Team Seven. This one isn’t bad, just crazy. Because that’s what her first instructor claims in her tact on note.  _ I am concerned that Sasuke is similar to her brother, and will be unable to undertake duties expected of a kunoichi. _

“If I’m lenient on her,” Kakashi says eventually, “then I have to lenient on the whole team, so get me a good group. No one annoying or too uptight or likely to keep crying about wanting their mother, understood?”

Clear relief flits across Iruka’s face. “I’ll see what I can do,” he says, which isn’t very encouraging. “Thank you. Really.”

“Letting her through like this is cheating,” Kakashi says. “Don’t thank me for that.”

After another round of thank yous, Iruka finally leaves, nearly walking into Asuma on the way out. “Isn’t that the Academy instructor?” Asuma says when he makes it over to Kakashi. “What did he want?”

As Asuma calls over the bartender, Kakashi answers, “To warn me. The Uchiha girl’s graduation’s coming up, and I’m getting her.”

“Well,” Asuma says, “if what I’ve heard is true, then she won’t pass your bell test. You’ll only have to deal that ghost story for a day.”

That’s what the girl is these days—a living ghost who haunts the house where the rest of her family died. She’s Itachi, and she’s Obito, and Kakashi can’t imagine a day when he’ll ever look at her face and see anything less than the dead.

 

 

Two weeks later, Team Seven consists of Haruno Sakura, a civilian’s daughter with hair as pink as her namesake, the twelve-year-old heir to Konoha’s most powerful clan, and  _ Minato and Kushina’s son. _

Naruto has his father’s hair, but everything from his round-cheeked face to his energetic temperament is all his mother. “I’ll be Hokage one day,” he declares when they all meet for the first time, unknowingly establishing a family legacy. Those are Minato’s words, and Kakashi debates right there whether or not he can justify breaking his agreement with Iruka.

Then they genuinely do pass, almost. Realizing the importance of teamwork is the main factor, but they still need to last until noon to prove they’re ready for the physical expectations of the field. None of them faint, so he tells himself they  _ could  _ do it given the chance, and calls an end early, because the little sister who maybe once liked doing chores won’t stop shaking. He accidentally nicks her neck above a thin scar on her collarbone more recent than the thinner scar on her cheek. Despite the warning that she panics when pinned to the ground, Kakashi hadn’t expected a reaction to someone simply grabbing her.

Six hours later, he finds Umino Iruka’s apartment number in the school’s contact book, and knocks on the door until it opens. The man looks exhausted, but Kakashi’s too irritated to be concerned. “We need to talk,” he says, letting himself in, and waits until the door is closed before asking, “What did you think you were doing with my team?”

Iruka sighs, and walks past Kakashi to the cheap living room futon, which clearly doubles as his bed. “I got Sakura on,” he says, lowering himself gingerly onto it. The apartment is a small studio, which is presumably the most he can afford on an instructor’s salary. “That’s it. I guess I should’ve figured that Naruto and Sasuke would be together, considering.”

“‘Considering?’” Kakashi repeats, folding his arms. “Because after all the bullshit her family went through, I figured they wouldn’t be allowed anywhere near each other—and speaking of, how didn’t you warn me that she has a  _ fully developed Sharingan? _ ”

“You mean you didn’t know?”

“Why would I?”

Even as he says it, he understands why Iruka assumes; it seems only logical for Kakashi to hear about that, given he has one himself. Unfortunately, it will only make training her more difficult. Like any technique, use of the Sharingan is not supposed to be self-taught. Kakashi had training, and most of the family only saw him as the reminder of Obito’s disgrace.

Iruka scrunches his mouth, and cringes when he adjusts himself. “If it makes you feel any better,” he says, “I think this was all a last minute decision. Naruto. Uh. Did you see the clones?”

In Kakashi’s preoccupation about Naruto simply  _ being  _ there, and the general disaster of Sasuke’s panic attack, he hasn’t thought about the clones in hours. Iruka spins a story about Naruto failing his graduating exam and passing belatedly when he learned what he is. “Not everything,” his instructor adds. “Not about his parents. I got this trying to protect him. The seal—cracked, I guess—and he made the clones he learned off a scroll.”

All it took was one fight to see that Naruto doesn’t have the tactical skills to be a danger to anyone, and that Sasuke’s in no state to stop any unlikely, potential mishaps. Kakashi frowns, and says, “Well, they passed. Pretty much on their own. I hope you’re happy.”

“Thank you,” Iruka says, with the audacity to look relieved. “Trust me, they’ll prove themselves. They’re good kids.”

When Kakashi leaves not five minutes later, stepping back into the summertime night thick with crickets chirping, he still doesn’t believe him. Oddly enough, he has the highest expectations for the civilians’ daughter. Little Sakura with her bright pink hair is at the age where her parents’ lifestyle is more influential to her mentality than her schooling, but she ranked second in her graduating class with no outside help. He might be able to handle just her and one of the others, but not all three. Not Naruto, who’s every inch his parents’ son without their skill, when Minato and Kushina were like Kakashi’s mother and father once. He doesn’t know how to return the favor.

Then there’s Uchiha Itachi’s little sister, who he’s already worried will die on their first mission outside Konoha’s walls.

So he’s careful, even as he tells himself he won’t be. Naruto and Sakura are wary of each other at first, both vying for Sasuke’s attention, but eventually they cobble together something resembling friendship. Sasuke isn’t very receptive to them, or to anything else. More often than not, her focus is away from the situation, falling instead on a songbird hopping across the ground or towards a different training field, where another team makes noise. It’s something Itachi used to do, near the end. Though she looks more like a small Mikoto than the rest of her family, there’s something in the way she holds herself, like she’s trying to disappear, that’s astoundingly similar to her brother.

By the time they do get that first mission outside the walls, it’s late September, and Naruto and Sakura are close enough that he can focus more on Sasuke than either of them. They’re going south to the Land of Waves, so it gets progressively hotter as the hours pass. Their charge is a drunk. Just before evening, a group of missing-nin attack, Kakashi fakes his death for answers, and Sasuke uses timing and tactics to force a man to kill his teammate.

A gennin shouldn’t be desensitized enough to do that. A gennin shouldn’t be  _ smart  _ enough to do that.

It takes another fight and the worst chakra burnout he’s had in years before he can finally talk to her. They reached their destination the night before, a small town on the outskirts of a small country. He leads her out to a ramshackle snack bar on the deserted beach recently closed for the season, and tells her to sit.

“I’m fine,” she tries to claim—tries to claim she can handle the upcoming fight, that she won’t disassociate or panic, because it’s nothing and she’s fine, she is. But missing-nin and warlords don’t give up after a defeat or two, and that’s the situation Team Seven walked into under false pretenses. He can’t have a girl whose safety he’s responsible for enter a fight feeling like she needs to prove herself out of embarrassment because she’s  _ fine. _

He sits next to her on the wooden steps, looking out across the ocean with its waves calmly lapping at the sand. “You can’t fight as a kunoichi if you’re afraid of physical contact,” he says. If they survive this, he’ll have to research coping mechanisms and help her work through her panic response. “And you didn’t have the reaction of a first kill. So what did cause you to kill someone before?”

Her shoulders shake, so she curls up further into herself. “I just reacted,” she says after a moment. “I didn’t want to get in trouble. I—I just wanted to get him  _ off  _ me, and my eyes, and there was no one, and—I don’t remember, just that—all I wanted was an apple—it just really, really, really, really  _ hurt _ , and the weapon’s pouch was right there, and no one was, I mean, I’m sorry, I’m really, really sorry—”

By the end, she’s crying, hands on her knees with her eyes pressed into her palms. It doesn’t matter that Iruka gave the warning about his theory. Hearing a twelve-year-old girl apologize from defending herself against her rapist is still hard.

“It’s not your fault,” he tries to tell her. He kneels on the final steps despite the groaning of his battered body, so they look each other in the eye. Hers are a dark blue, not black like he thought.

He tells her it’s not her fault, so she leans forward and wraps her skinny arms around his neck. After a moment, he returns the favor, tucking his arms around her narrow back, and keeping silent as she cries.

 

 

There isn’t much material in the library to handle a situation like this, so Kakashi eventually concedes and asks Mina, the psychologist he had to see after Minato and Kushina died. Now she has crows’ feet around her eyes and deep frown lines on her forehead, developed from a career of talking to people like him.

“Don’t ‘hypothetically’ me, Kakashi,” she says, narrowing her eyes. Her long grey hair is styled back in a severe bun that pulls at her skin, and her collar has a recent coffee stain. They’re in her office, an sterile-feeling room on the top floor of the hospital. Though he doesn’t know her age for certain, he doubts she’ll be practicing for more than another couple years. “Who is she?” she asks. “A student? Daughter of a friend? No matter. You need to have her see someone, not deal with it yourself.”

“If that happens this early in her career,” he says, expecting this, “she won’t be allowed to continue.”

Mina, bluntly, asks, “Is that such a bad thing?”

Despite her clear misgivings, she tells him to give the girl a way to feel in control. Have her spar, so she’s more comfortable working with and against others. Force her into social situations she can easily escape. Always be certain she knows she has a choice.

He tries his best, at least thinks she improves, and still regrets giving her the chuunin exam contract the moment she returns with it signed.

“Hyuga-san practically bribed the Hokage,” Kurenai is saying as Kakashi enters the tower in the center of the Forest of Death on the first day of the exams, “to withdraw Hinata if it even seems like she’s in danger. Do you know how hard it is to teach her with him breathing down my neck? All while murdering her self-esteem at home?” When she notices Kakashi, she adds, “I’m sure your girl’s getting the same even without blatant bribery.”

Other than the two of them, the only ones in the tower are Asuma, Anko, Gemna, and Hisakawa Hitomi, who he knows from his ANBU days. Already the surveillance screens loop to the different cameras within the forest, though all teams are just inside their separate gates. Team Seven is hidden from view, but Teams Eight and Ten are both in clearings counting their provisions.

“If Sasuke’s getting special treatment,” he says, watching for his team, “then no one told me, so I doubt it.”

Hisakawa makes a noise halfway between an exhale and a laugh. “There’s no way Uchiha Itachi’s leftovers won’t get special privileges,” she says as the Kazekage’s children move away from their underbrush cover. “You must have some amazing trust in her skills not to request it yourself.”

With a sharp, sideways glance, Anko says, “She’s got a point, Hatake. Either your team’s great at stealth, which I doubt with Uzumaki, or they’re hiding, because they’re the only ones not visible.”

Every few seconds, one of the videos statics. The surveillance room is small, windowless, and dimply lit, with only one poorly working radiator in the corner to heat it. This is the maximum number of people who can fit. If Asuma and Kurenai weren’t there, he’d defend his team’s merit, but the three of them are technically competing, so he shrugs instead. It’s better not to explain Naruto is great in the field, but has no attention span out of it, or Sasuke’s affinity is lightning, but she mastered fire at seven. No one mentions Sakura at all, though she’s no less skilled than her teammates.

A half hour into the test, the Suna team kills their first opponents in a flurry of sand, and Genma says, “Did anyone think to bring snacks? Our shift doesn’t end til midnight.”

“There’s a cantina downstairs,” Asuma says. “Oh fucking— _ guys, no. _ Don’t hide.” On screen nine, his team very clearly crawls under a boulder to avoid a squad from Ame with the opposite scroll. “Remind me to chew them out later. Food’s decent, Genma. Avoid the coffee.”

Genma leaves to steal snacks as Kurenai curses her team for making the same decision as Asuma’s. Moments later, Kakashi’s finally appears in screen four’s grainy footage, clearly in the middle of a fight. She sighs dramatically. “Of course your team is actually doing something,” she says.

“No,” Kakashi says, scanning the screen as Sasuke runs out of view, the enemy-nin in close pursuit. “Something’s wrong. My team is good with teamwork, so what’re they doing?”

Right before the screen changes to a new location, he watches Sakura run in the opposite direction. Naruto is out of view entirely, until screen five shifts in time to show he and Sakura battling an oversized snake. Meanwhile, in the new screen three, the enemy-nin peels a black film away from his body that Kakashi realizes with a jolt is skin, as Sasuke stumbles to her feet, kunai in hand.

“I’m pursuing,” Anko says, already gathering her weapons, recognizing at the same time Kakashi does that the man is Orochimaru. “Someone get the Sandaime for permission to pull the team. Kakashi, you should stay here in case they make it.”

“I will,” Asuma says as Kakashi protests it’s his right to help his team, and on screen, his twelve-year-old student fights off a legend injured and alone. “No, Kakashi, she’s right. Anko, bring someone with you.”

Hitomi abuses her rank, and orders him to stay, before leaping through the window after Anko. Then Asuma’s gone, and Kakashi and Kurenai stand silent and anxious as the radiator crackles in the corner and the screen loops away from the fight.

 

 

The Sandaime doesn’t withdraw Team Seven, and they reach the tower by morning, all riddled with injuries. A week later, a short preliminary tournament bars Sakura from the third test anyway, but Sasuke and Naruto are allowed to advance.

“It’s so unfair,” Sakura says during their first private training session now that Jiraiya’s tutoring Naruto and Sasuke refuses help. “A double disqualification should call for a rematch, right? Hinata, Tenten, us, and Kiba are the Konoha-nin not going through, and—well, Kiba uses a dog to fight. So what’s that supposed to say about Konoha kunoichi?”

In the six months since graduation, Sakura never once mentioned the gender power imbalance rampant in their society. Kakashi looks at her, frowning into her cooling tea as they sit for a short break on a log near the icy lake at training field four, and says, “It didn’t count because in a real fight, you’d both be dead. Choji didn’t go through. Neither did, what’s his name? Lee?”

Sakura breathes hard, releasing a small cloud of condensation. “Yeah, but Choji’s Choji,” she says as the wind ruffles her hair. “I don’t think anyone could’ve done better than Lee in that situation. And I know what you’re going to say next. ‘What about Sasuke?’ Well, Sasuke’s literally famous, like, even in other countries, so that doesn’t count. Her fight’s all anyone’s talking about already.”

Sasuke isn’t famous for her own accomplishments, which her teammates can’t understand. This past test, that very public match, will only make establishing a sense of individuality harder now that every Konoha-nin her brother’s age and older just witnessed the perfect imitation of his signature technique. But right now Sakura, with her righteous anger and big green eyes bloodshot from insomnia, doesn’t need a lesson in the politics of public image. Not when she’s only just beginning to realize the world is unfair, and hopefully not coming to the conclusion that change comes so slowly that she should let it stay that way. He doubts she will, though; he has higher hopes for her moral code.

During their month of private sessions, Kakashi teaches Sakura the basics her upbringing forced her to miss. “You feel like your stamina is worse than it is,” he explains on that first day, “because you don’t control your breathing, and you put too much energy into your attacks. Never try to fight like you’re bigger than are. There’s a perfect style for everyone.”

Together, they go through the Academy’s ten basic kata, and he adjusts her form for nearly every stance. At each session, which they hold five times a week, she wears her newly cut hair back in variously patterned strips of cloth like Uchiha Mikoto did when he first met her in the early days of the war. On a day she wears a red-and-white checkered cloth tied in a lopsided bow on the top of her head, he thinks mildly that he should be glad Sasuke isn’t the type to ask for fashion advice, because people consider her a ghost enough as it is.

Two weeks into training, Sakura says, “I did this thing during the second test where I made my punch stronger with chakra, but it must’ve been adrenaline because I haven’t been able to do it again. That’s how I fractured my fingers. Is there a way to do that without hurting myself?”

“Senju Tsunade does something similar,” he tells her, not terribly surprised she managed that sort of attack. They’re in training field six today, the one against the walls, which she leans into as she tries to catch her breath. Despite the frigid, early winter weather, both their thick coats are in a heap on the frost coated grass. “Your control is already better than most, but it needs to be perfect if you’re going to pull that off.”

“I’ll do it,” she says, mouth set in a line and nose the same red as the squares on her headband from the cold. “I  _ will  _ make chuunin in the next exam.”

It’s the first real goal she’s set for herself, so he teaches her to walk on water, and then to fight on it. Just before they move past the basics, though, the third test arrives, and they take a long weekend break.

First Naruto defeats Neji in a display of sheer stamina as much as oddball strategy, overwhelming the Byakugan with a countless number of clones that creates a blinding pile of yellow hair glowing in the sun. The majority of the crowd cheers, applause rising in a shocked wave that scares the birds in the stadium rafters as Naruto grins. The gambling minority who bet on Neji sit in dismayed silent, all identically open-mouthed. Sakura stands leaning over the railing, her shouted words lost in the noise.

That noise silences abruptly, and Sakura reclaims her seat at Kakashi’s side when the Kazekage’s son and Uchiha Itachi’s little sister take their places on the crater riddled field. There’s no clan symbol on her back, but even those who weren’t there for the preliminary tournament recognize her.

She dodges the Suna-nin’s sentient sand—the sand that almost crushed a boy to pieces—once, twice, and strikes him with a bolt of lightning created without hand seals. She didn’t want to be known only as her brother’s sister anymore, she told Kakashi when he asked why she insisted on training alone. Now the audience watches in a second bout of shocked silence as she moves in a newly created style with lightning as her main weapon. Even Kumo-nin need hand seals. Even Kakashi does.

“Oh,” Sakura says weakly beside him, momentarily drawing his attention away from the fight. “Oh.”

Then the referee calls, “Winner, Uchiha Sasuke,” and everything goes wrong.

 

 

Traditionally, the chuunin exams end with a two day festival celebrating whichever contestants are promoted. This one ends in the Sandaime’s funeral.

After the ceremony—after the village leader is burned and the smell thinly disguised with a thousand flowers—the Haruno parents corale Kakashi’s team. “We’ll get a nice, hot meal into all of you,” Sakura’s mother says with a strained smile as she pets down Naruto’s unruly hair. “Everything always seems better with a bit of udon in your stomach.”

Naruto nods with a glum thank you, but Sasuke politely refuses. “I just want my own bed,” she says. “I’m still really tired.”

With her pale skin, dark hair, and black funeral attire, she fades into the somber winter scene in sharp contrast to colorful teammates. Kakashi waits until Sakura’s mother instructs her husband to take Naruto and their daughter home while she walks with Sasuke before turning away. Jiraiya still stands in front of the pyre, head bowed with a wilting white lily clutched in his fist.

“Shimura hinted that the Council’s going to ask me to take his place,” he says in a low, melancholic sort of mumble as Kakashi steps up to his side. “Congratulated me for it. That passive-aggressive fuck.”

By now, most of the blanketing flowers are covered in snow and ashes. In the last week, civilian stoneworkers successfully fixed the fissures that formed across the Sandaime’s face where it’s carved into the mountainside. They scratched out his name on the Hokage’s memorial stone to symbolize the overwhelming loss left behind in the wake of a leader’s unnatural death. Main Street and the residential areas were untouched by the Suna and Oto attack, but the destroyed roofs of the business district are just visible through the new path the jinchuriki carved through the woods.

If it weren’t for his team, the damage might have been irreparable. As it is, the Sandaime is dead, Orochimaru announced himself active, and Sasuke proved that the rumors of what her family was capable of are true.

Kakashi stares at the pyre, still smoking but coated in snow, and says, “You’d be a terrible Hokage, but he’s worse. Who do you have in mind?”

“Tsunade,” Jiraiya says immediately. “I’ll find her wherever she’s hiding and force her to take the position if I have to—and I want to bring Minato’s son with me.”

Though Kakashi thinks of Naruto as “Minato’s son,” he hasn’t said the words aloud in about ten years. “It’s not a bad idea,” Kakashi says. “He’s…convincing. Is this to make sure he’s promoted?”

“With his history? He’ll need every advantage he can get.” Jiraiya sighs, and tosses his lily over a cluster of roses. “I’ll give him another couple weeks of private tutoring. Teach him some family techniques.” He pauses before adding, “If—when—Tsunade agrees, she’ll ask me about the contestants. Uchiha is—well, I think the last person even close to skill like that at her age was her brother, but from what I’ve heard, she’s a piece of work.”

Over the last month, Kakashi received blunt sympathy for “getting stuck with  _ that  _ team” from jounin who only recently learned who his students are. A civilian’s daughter. The Kyuubi’s jinchuriki. The kid Uchiha Itachi drove insane.

“That’s all just rumors,” Kakashi says firmly. “For both of them. They both deserve a promotion. Sasuke had some trouble coming out of the Academy, but we worked on it.”

“I’ll let her know,” Jiraiya says as far away, something crashes, and a flock of birds shoots from the trees, a flurry of black against the heavy grey sky.

 

 

Uchiha Itachi comes to Konoha on a Tuesday, less than a week after the Sandaime’s funeral, and Kakashi joins a team of jounin meant to kill him. Sometime later, in what simultaneously feels like an eternity and no time at all, he wakes gasping in a hospital bed with Senju Tsunade’s hand over his eyes.

It takes a full day to reorient himself with the physical world and natural passage of time, and another couple before he’s released. By nightfall, he’s in the Hokage’s suddenly impersonal office, all the Sandaime’s possessions removed and Tsunade not yet settled. A mass of paperwork stands piled on her desk. Behind her, in the floor to ceiling window that makes up the back wall, he can see construction workers finishing for the day.

After he takes his seat and pleasantries are over, Tsunade sighs, wariness already written across her unnaturally young face, and says, “Convince me that your team should be promoted. Why do they deserve it?”

“Because Naruto went from barely passing graduation to defeating last year’s top student in six months,” he answers, offended she even asks when there are only three contestants to choose from and they helped stop the Suna invasion, “and Sasuke has the technical qualifications to be a jounin.”

“What?” Her eyebrows shoot up, so the dot on her forehead wrinkles.

Kakashi nods. “Yeah,” he says. “She uses both lightning and fire easily. My team already completed an A-ranked mission, even if it was an accident. And she made her own advanced technique. Not advancing my team because of public opinion is an insult of both of them.”

Rumors are dangerous, and both Naruto and Sasuke attract them. With a small, tired smile, as though admitting she knows this, Tsunade says, “Well, for the most part public opinion is that you got the short end of the stick when it came to team pair-ups, which is why I’m also asking your personal opinion on whether or not I should take on Haruno Sakura as an apprentice.”

Though Sakura mentioned wanting to train with Tsunade, it was only in passing. “Did she come by?” Kakashi asks and when Tsunade explains that his often overlooked student knocked on her door and downright demanded training because she  _ needs  _ to help her team, he says, “Well, she already figured out your technique. You’re going to be better at teaching that than I am. So is this all happening, or not?”

A few days later, Sakura is Tsunade’s apprentice but still Kakashi’s official student, and Naruto and Sasuke both advance. He barely gets the opportunity to exchange more than a few words with any of them before he’s swept away on a scouting mission in the Land of Wind meant to make certain their new ally’s pledge of friendship is genuine. His team returns with good news to learn Naruto and Sasuke walked into a trap near the western border. Jiraiya is already about to leave on the rescue mission alone, but Kakashi snags a medic he knows from his days with Rin, and comes along.

They find Naruto first, bundled tight in his winter weather camouflage so he’s just a blur of white on white. “Kakashi-sensei,” he says with a sound like a sob, and sags all his weight against Kakashi’s side. As he wraps his arm around his student, Jiraiya’s face pinches like he forgot Naruto isn’t Minato.

“Hey, you’re safe,” Kakashi says, rubbing Naruto’s shoulder. It’s midday, the sun high in the cloudless sky and glaring off the snow from a recent storm. “What happened? Where’s Sasuke?”

“Sasuke—Sasuke was—”

Sasuke was struck clean through the shower with an arrow, the creation of an Oto-nin mutated by a seal on his neck. There were five, Naruto says. Sasuke killed three. By the time he warned her about the arrow, she’d been hit. The fifth arrived at the end, when the fourth was leading him away. Despite her injury, he assumed she would be safe because of her eyes.

When he tried to return, he couldn’t find his way back. There were too many webs, Naruto tells them.

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Kakashi says, though he feels his own measure of dread. “Between the four of us, we’ll find her.”

Eventually, they find her stumbling through snow-covered underbrush, and she runs straight for her teammate, dragging him close with one arm. The other hangs limp at her side with her jacket so saturated in blood that she’s a visible target through the trees. He gets a flash suddenly of Rin’s first jounin mission, when their two teammates died and Kakashi found her with a slash down her back. He hadn’t saved the others, too preoccupied in saving her. She refused to let go of his hand for the whole run home.

With a deep breath, he untangles his two students, and leads Sasuke to Rin’s old friend, who quickly discovers bandages wrapped beneath her torn jacket and shirt. “Did you do this?” she asks.

As Sasuke goes to answer, Jiraiya reappears from the tree line where he was out scouting to say there’s a body torn to pieces in a clearing nearby. Turning to Sasuke, he asks, “Who helped you?”

Sasuke can’t have bandaged her shoulder one handed, and she doesn’t have the physical strength to defeat someone like that. Even before she says, “My brother,” Kakashi  _ knows _ —knows now from experience that any seven-year-old should have died from having the Tsukuyomi burned through her head, so she didn’t survive because of a mistake or dumb luck, but because Itachi always loved her best.

 

 

After Kakashi and the others return from the mission that wasn’t a mission, he learns Jiraiya’s taking Naruto away from specialized training.

“You can have talked to me first,” Kakashi says once the arrangement is complete, and Jiraiya comes to tell him in his small, two bedroom apartment located in the good part of downtown. “The Akatsuki is after him. He needs practical experience.”

“No, he needs control,” Jiraiya says as he helps himself to a glass of whiskey. “What, do you think you’re going to help him with that here? One of the reasons Tsunade took on Haruno is free  _ you  _ up for missions.”

Kakashi shakes his head, exasperated. “You have no qualifications to teach a jinchuriki control,” he says, “so don’t try that bullshit on me. You wouldn’t bother if it was anyone else.”

Shrugging, Jiraiya says, “No one else is my godson,” and ambles over to the cheap, self-constructed sofa, sprawling across the cushions.

Though Kakashi’s not usually the type to lose his temper, he feels it flare now. “He’s  _ my  _ student,” he says. It’s worse because he hadn’t expected this; until now, he was too concerned with Sasuke, her development of the Mangekyo Sharingan through an illusion, and her frighteningly calm reaction to her brother. “You’ve worked with him, sure, but not—”

“No, actually,” Jiraiya says lightly. “He’s not.”

“What?”

“Your student. He’s not. He’s been promoted.”

In a chuunin’s early days, the chuunin is still their sensei’s student, which is an unofficial principle everyone knows, but legally, Jiraiya is right. Kakashi’s hand curls where it rests against the kitchen wall, and he says, “I don’t care. I don’t care if he and Sasuke were promoted, or if Sakura’s pulling extra hours with Tsunade. They’re all still my responsibility.”

Jiraiya places his glass down on the coffee table next to the coaster. “They’ve been your students less than a year,” he says. “Look, I’ll admit it. They’ve all improved way more than average, but it’s still only a few months. And he’s still my godson.”

“Fuck,” Kakashi says, exhaling sharply. “Who the  _ fuck  _ are you that you think you can show up after thirteen years and start caring?”

“Isn’t that a little hypocritical?”

“At least we  _ tried. _ ”

For a long moment, neither of them speak. Then Jiraiya says to the far wall, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Kakashi turns, grabs the whiskey from the counter and a glass from the drying rack, and pours a generous helping. “We were fifteen,” he says, turning back to look at his father’s old friend. “Everyone knew we were together. We were living together. But it’s not like we were even thinking about marriage or anything. Basic verdict was that kids can’t take in kids, and we weren’t stable enough anyway.”

When Minato and Kushina died, Kakashi and Rin had been together for six months, and stayed together until he killed her a year and a half later. Of course they petitioned to take in Naruto, to keep up him from growing up alone. By then, Kakashi was already an ANBU captain, and she was his team’s medic whether or not they were masked. In Konoha, she worked regular hours at the hospital. They were so certain they’d been allowed, since they had the financial means, an apartment already equipped with a spare room, and a personal connection. Then the Sandaime gave Naruto the name Uzumaki rather than Namikaze, Mina slapped them both with an “at risk” label, and they all went on with their lives.

“He’s not Minato,” Kakashi says after another pronounced silence. “Do him the courtesy and yourself the favor of not treating him like he is.”

Jiraiya doesn’t have an answer to that. Instead he finishes his drink and excuses himself, leaving Kakashi frustrated and angry and alone.

 

 

To allow Sasuke more time as an ordinary chuunin, and to avoid any unnecessary inquiries, Kakashi agreed to keep the Mangekyo Sharingan a secret. Despite his efforts, her skill level combined with Konoha’s depleted resources earn her a new status of “honorary jounin.” Suddenly, she joins him in the field as a teammate rather than a student.

In early March, they join Asuma and Kurenai for a reconnaissance mission in the southern Land of Water, which is predominately a tourist destination. Both Kakashi and Sasuke wear sunglasses to hide their eyes, easily disguised among the hundreds of civilians enjoying a day in the sun, and walk through the surf with Sharingan active to find their target’s chakra signature. His name is Airiki Natsu, and he’s a retired hunter-nin. According to rumors, he now helps organize an international group of nin-for-hire who are just beginning to grow large enough to be trouble. All they need to do this time is discover if the rumors are true.

Between the two of them, it won’t be difficult to learn what they need, and then erase the incident from Airiki’s head. Kurenai and Asuma are the strike force, but treat this like a vacation, sharing some brightly colored drink at the beachside bar.

Sasuke, still young as she is, moves her feet through the waves that roll across their ankles to create a low splash in a way that’s entirely sincere. “I like the water,” she says. “I wish we lived near it. The ocean, I mean. Not just the river.”

Within the next hour, he knows that opinion will change, because her cheeks and shoulders are reddening already. When they were kids, Obito had the same issue, burning too quickly for any amount of sunscreen to save him. She should reek of it, but the sea air overpowers the smell.

“The river isn’t so bad,” Kakashi says rather than remind her of her genetic weakness. A long time ago, pale skin was a sign of high social standing, but that physical ideal died before his parents were born. “It’s a reflective pool. Think of the fireworks.”

“Think of about the mosquitoes it brings.”

That’s a fair argument he can’t counter. On a sandbar not far away, a group of teenagers chase each other, knocking a rainbow striped beach ball around aimlessly. She watches them, nose scrunched. Itachi used to do that. So did Kakashi, and Rin, and Obito, and everyone at that age. The issue with children teammates is just that: they’re children. Regardless of Sasuke’s past and the color of her eyes, that’s still true.

Even so. In that last minute before Jiraiya left, when Naruto wanted to say goodbye, he casually mentioned she looked him in the eye and claimed she’d kill him or worse if her brother captured Naruto. Then, more seriously, he said he fully believed that she can and would do it.

They find their target forty-five minutes later, and talk him into entering an abandoned shack just past the public beach. Rumors understated his importance and the size of the ring, so they render him unconscious and take him back to T&I.

For Sasuke, she has an unplanned break, but he leaves almost immediately on a C-ranked mission with Sakura and Team Gai, excluding Gai but including Lee. Gai still hasn’t returned from his last mission, but they need training, Sakura needs practical experience, and Kakashi is available. The mission is to guard a construction site no one cares about enough to attack in Morimura, the nearest village to Konoha’s walls.

It takes a day for Kakashi to decide he never wants to work with Team Gai again. He can’t handle Lee’s one-sided rivalry with his teammate, Tenten’s thinly veiled jealousy of Sakura’s apprenticeship, and Neji’s blatant dislike of Kakashi’s old students. To make it worse, all this typical, early teenage drama goes unresolved. Neji doesn’t acknowledge Lee’s feelings; Sakura’s oblivious to Tenten’s; Naruto ceased thinking of the fight as important once it was over; Sasuke only thinks of the Hyuga clan during her rare displays of family pride.

Sakura, who’s as blasé about this as Kakashi is, thumbs through notes Tsunade wrote personally for her to study while Tenten indiscreetly peeks over her shoulder. “I’ve been meaning to ask,” she says at just past noon when they break with the workers, picking forlornly at her anpan, “how did you score the apprenticeship?”

At the question, Neji and Lee cut off their conversation about that one waitress at the curry place, and Sakura and Kakashi look up from their concentrated effort to fairly split her mother’s homemade onigiri. “What?” Sakura says, as though she doesn’t hear this once weekly. “I guess I was just lucky enough to ask before anyone else, you know?” Though she says it cheerfully, Kakashi knows her well enough to hear the annoyance in her voice.

A few feet away, in the huddle of workers, a man jeers that women have no place in their business. Kakashi and the four gennin collectively sigh, and Lee, under his breath, says, “A kunoichi in training could finish this faster.”

“We aren’t even in the borderlands,” Tenten says, frowning. “People are misogynistic.”

“You make it sound like they aren’t in Konoha,” Sakura says bluntly, and bites into the pickled plum onigiri her mother made because her father never learned to cook.

Kakashi likes his now rare, easy mission with only Sakura, or Sakura and sometimes unwillingly borrowed others. Back when Team Seven was still together, she tended to be overshadowed by the others. Naruto’s energy and volume forced people to pay attention to him. Sasuke attempts to keep herself invisible, which is so unhealthy that Kakashi needs to focus most on her. Despite Sakura’s position as the Godaime’s only apprentice, she’s the closest to normal—sensible, well aware of but modest about her skill, and always ready to be annoyed at the injustice of gender norms.

As bad as it is, she’s a good break from Sasuke, because Sasuke’s a lot of work. It’s not her fault. It’s just that she’s young, and people forget that she’s young, so they give her the type of orders everyone claimed would stop after the Uchiha Act of 93 was ratified. On their first mission, which was the mission before last, she killed A-ranked Ryuumaru Akichi, and then panicked belatedly because Genma asked her to push up her sleeve so he could stitch a cut on her arm. Ultimately, she allowed Kakashi to do it, but only because he talked the entire time.

He doesn’t need to worry about that with Sakura. Even if she didn’t make chuunin, he knows he was right to have the highest hopes for her when this all started.

When they return to Konoha, it’s night, so he walks Sakura to her apartment, where Sasuke is single-handedly constructing a nuts-and-bolts sofa on the main room floor. Sakura drops her pack at the door and asks, “Where’d you get the money for this?”

Most of their money goes to rent and groceries, which doesn’t leave enough excess to spend on furniture. Sasuke doesn’t look up from the badly printed instructions. “Apparently I’m on salary now,” she says. “I got promoted to jounin the day after you left. Some help please?”

Even honorary jounin aren’t promoted without a lengthy process of interviews, tests, and evaluations. But it’s late, and she looks as though she’s been working on this all day, so Kakashi sets aside his questions for later and takes away the wrench.

 

 

In the months following Sasuke’s promotion, the rhetoric surrounding her name abruptly changes. Kakashi goes from coworkers telling him, “Cut your losses and start focusing on Uzumaki and the Godaime’s new pet before your kid kills herself,” to hearing stories referring to her as Sasuke, not Uchiha Itachi’s little sister or a ghost story, or Kakashi’s kid. Despite all misgivings and general skepticism, her learning curve will almost always result in her matching the skill level of those she’s with and against, and eventually surpassing both. He thinks later that he should have known, because Itachi was like that too, and she’s so remarkably similar to him sometimes that it’s still hard to separate them.

Somehow, that’s more comforting than unsettling. Itachi’s mind went sideways in the end, but he always survived, and she has a better support system than he ever did anyway.

But that doesn’t make him feel any better when she leaves for Suna for the Midsummer festival, or even when she comes back, and says, “Temari and her brothers asked me to be a supervisor at their chuunin exams.”

She says it casually. They’re with Kurenai, waiting for Anko just outside the village gates, so they can leave for another short retrieval mission of a gennin team that was meant to return three days ago. There’s still the last hints of a sunburn on her shoulders and cheeks, and she has her camouflage jacket tied around her waist, so she and Kurenai are dressed identically. Just last week, when some civilian returned with a tidbit rumor that Temari of Suna offered Sasuke the Kazekage tower’s official guest suite, a regular patron of Kakashi’s corner bar said he forgot how sweet kids were. Laughed about it. Said only a kid could do, make friends with the enemy.

Maybe Suna isn’t the enemy now, but they were just recently. Sasuke says it so casually it’s like she doesn’t remember the attack.

“Already?” Kurenai says as she ties back her heavy hair. The sky’s overcast, but it’s still early July, so the heat is at its most uncomfortable. “That’s quick.”

Sasuke shrugs. “I guess.”

“Did you like it?” Kakashi asks, folding his arms and leaning against the village walls. “Suna, I mean.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’s—I don’t know. Pretty? And the festival wasn’t that bad. Konoha’s fireworks are better, though.”

“That’s because Konoha’s fireworks are the best,” Kurenai says, and though Sasuke hasn’t seen enough displays around the world to act as an informed opinion, she readily agrees.

Frowning behind his mask, Kakashi asks, “Did you agree? To supervise.”

Again, she shrugs. “Didn’t see why I shouldn’t. They offered me the guest room.”

Though every village attempts to increase protection when hosting the chuunin exams, the nature of the event means security is inherently laxer. Someone like Sasuke staying in the guest room of the Kazekage’s tower has a bad connotation for other Konoha-nin, but he’s more concerned with the possibility of another attack. There wasn’t one in Iwa, but Suna is the better target. Chuunin and jounin have reported general sightings of Orochimaru over the past few months, and if he wants another opportunity to go after Sasuke, then a second chuunin exam is ideal. Her impressive learning curve doesn’t have much bearing against that.

“So is it true?” Kurenai says before Kakashi can explain this. “Are they seriously going to make that Gaara kid Kazekage?”

“Actually,” Sasuke answers, her sunburn pink cheeks flushing further, “I can kind of see why. He’s the  _ last  _ Kazekage’s son, so he knows all the politics and everything, and he probably is the best in the village. And people change, right?”

“Not that quickly,” Kakashi says.

Frowning, she says, “Well, maybe not everything, but they can.”

Kurenai, misunderstanding, rolls her eyes. “Maybe for the worst.”

Before Sasuke can snap back, or Kakashi attempt to change the subject, Anko finally emerges from the small guard door a half hour after what even he considers late. “My cat-sitter flaked,” she says, which is a better excuse than any he thinks up, given it’s probably true. “I had to hire  _ gennin. _ Hey, kid. You’re looking a little less burnt to a crisp than I thought.”

“My roommate’s Haruno Sakura,” Sasuke says, before shooting another glance at Kakashi. Anko looks to Kurenai, one brow raised, who returns the expression in a promise to explain later. “He’s not the same. Really. I thought he was the last ditch effort, but he’s not.”

These days, people talk about Sasuke as Sasuke, but that only means they’re scrutinizing her and any actions out of place. Kids are sweet. Kids can create friends from recent enemies. For Naruto or Sakura or the rest of that generation, the ability to do that is exasperating, but not worrisome. For Sasuke, her stubborn insistence now that people can change is just a call back to when she developed the Mangekyo Sharingan and said, “He left me alive when he killed everyone else. Must mean he cares or something.”

She can’t make friends with the future Kazekage, who almost destroyed Konoha less than a year ago, or go to Suna where she risks another attack, and she can’t believe Itachi will change.

“Right,” Kakashi says, killing the conversation before it can go any further. “Good to know your cat troubles are solved. Let’s move out.”

Within a day, they find the gennin team dead without any hint as to who did it. Sasuke takes the smallest, and doesn’t speak a word the entire trek back home.

 

 

Sakura’s status as a gennin saves Kakashi from needing to test another team come the August Academy graduation, but he still has nearly a month’s leave. That’s when Sasuke returns from a mission to kill Airiki Natsu’s nin-for-hire with her team captain and teammate dead.

According to Rei, his one other connection at the hospital, his old student is only in the hospital for observation. “Of course, they wouldn’t do this with anyone else,” she says when she tells him, half-focused on her game of Sudoku. He’s known Rei for years, though they aren’t friends; she was Rin’s friend, the two of them meeting at the start of their medical training. “But she’s young, and she’s cute, and she’s famous. She’s almost worse than you at that age.”

“Shut up,” Kakashi says without heat. They’re at the local park two blocks from the hospital and three blocks from Main Street, melting on the bench, though they miraculously found one in the shade. “Observation for what? What happened?”

By now, he’s heard rumors, but he hasn’t spoken to either Sasuke or any medical-nin, who know the truth. Rei looks up from her puzzle, so her overgrown, pale brown bangs fall back from shielding her face. “Nothing physical,” she says. “That’s what I mean. Well, it was in the beginning, but you know how first deaths are. She hasn’t been on any other mission where her team’s been killed, right?”

He’d heard about Sagi and Amiko, two jounin promoted around the same time as Sasuke, but the usual protocol for the death of a team is a ten minute meeting of a psychologist to receive a hospital release form, and an expectation that friends and family will deal with the rest. Even young, cute, famous thirteen-year-olds with a history of mental illness shouldn’t be exempt. When he was her age, he was a war hero. People treated him similarly to how they treat her. Whatever happened was out of the ordinary.

On Tuesday morning, she’s released, but Sakura has to work the night shift in the children’s ward, and bluntly asks in front of Sasuke, without speaking with her first, if she can spend the night in Kakashi’s spare room. “I’m fine,” she says, snappish, and still ends up at his small kitchen table, picking listlessly at take-out from the sushi bar down the road.

“You need to eat something,” he says, knowing how he sounds, but he doesn’t like how baggy her pajama shirt’s grown. Her collarbones are too prominent, birdlike where her neckline is visible.

With a single-shoulder shrug, she says, “I’m not hungry. They gave me a sedative.”

“They gave you a sedative?” Neither Sakura nor Rei mentioned drugs. When Sasuke doesn’t answer, he adds, “Is it still in your system?”

“Probably.”

At times, when he’s talking to her, he feels older than his age, like all his silver hair is justified. Minato and Kushina must have found him just as exhausting as he finds her during conversations like this, because some of their discussions mirror the ones from his own childhood. With slow blinks, she looks down at her dinner, so he represses a sigh, and says, “Make yourself. You’ll feel nauseous otherwise. Then go to bed.”

“What am I, seven?” The petulance is forced.

“You’re thirteen and drugged,” he answers. “Eat.”

Though it’s clearly a struggle, she manages a few pieces, before laying down her chopsticks and rubbing her temples. “My head hurts,” she says. “Can I lie down?”

There’s still too much food on her plate, but her face is paler than usual and her shoulders shaking. When he concedes, she slips off the stool, but she isn’t steady on her feet. Sakura should have warned him about the drugs when she explained the situation.

He finishes his dinner, clears the table, and has the bed made by the time she emerges from the bathroom, her hair damp from a shower. “I could’ve done it,” she says in a low mumble that jumbles together her words. “You didn’t have to.”

“It’s fine,” he says, though he understands her discomfort. “Don’t feel like you need to wake up tomorrow. You’ve got a couple weeks off.”

“Really?”

“Death of a teammate gets you paid leave.”

She looks down, and scuffs her socked foot across his rug. “We were done with the mission,” she says, voice dropping further. “Yakushi Kabuto’s the one who got them. Looking for me. The Godaime still won’t do anything about it.”

Ever since she returned from Suna, he’s been so preoccupied with the thought of the danger the exams posed that it hadn’t occurred to him that Orochimaru would attack on an ordinary mission. “It’s not your fault,” he tells her. He tells her this a lot. “How’d you get away?”

After a clear moment’s hesitation, she says, “I didn’t. Not really. I just—I ran. Into Ame. And Kisame of Kiri was there. He blocked Yakushi and told me to run for Konoha. Yeah, the Godaime didn’t like that either.”

He shuts his eyes briefly, and when he opens them again, she’s looking up, her short hair in her face and her posture slouched. “Well, I’m glad he was there,” he says with a small smile.

To his surprise, she steps forward and hugs him, wrapping her arms around his middle. Then the surprise fades, because he understands what it’s like to be young and scared and sad. “You’re okay,” he says. “Everything will be okay.”

 

 

Kakashi loved a girl once.

“We have the rest of our lives to be sad,” Nahora Rin said after the War, after the memorial for all the casualties lost for a cause everyone’d forgotten years ago. It was June, two days after Midsummer. Before the War, that was a holiday. After, it just became another day—a different sort of wartime casualty than the type that leaves ashes in the dirt.

That night, they wandered the village streets, discussing the daunting reality of suddenly have to plan for a future. They fell asleep together in a tree outside the park, and woke covered in pollen and dogwood petals. She was just fifteen, but he had another few months left until his birthday. It was morning, they were used to falling asleep in trees together after their time on the front, and they laughed sleepy laughs while declaring neither of them would ever do it again. Not now. Not here back home.

By noon, they found a decent, two bedroom apartment on the good side of downtown, and moved in two weeks later. In September, he turned fifteen, and the bedroom he once called his was already just the spare.

Loving Rin, who was kind and pragmatic and realistic and so doubtful of her own worth that it wasn’t surprising she stepped in front of his attack, was both easy, and the hardest thing he’d ever done. It took almost longer than she was willing to wait before he grew comfortable around her. At seventeen, they still weren’t discussing marriage, but they discussed in passing the rest of their lives with a casual  _ we. We  _ did this.  _ We  _ did that. No one needed clarification who that  _ we  _ was at the start of a conversation. People had high hopes for that  _ we _ .

He still catches sight of her at times in the curve of a stranger’s smile, and the sterile hospital smell he grew accustomed to after years of doing her laundry. Sometimes he looks at Sasuke, and catches sight of Rin in a life they might have lived.

When Itachi killed his family, Kakashi was nineteen and she would’ve been twenty, had she lived that long. Neither of them were the type to have children, or want them, or feel that obligation some of their generation developed after the War to help all the broken hearted. But Sasuke is like Naruto. The situation is personal. Alone, the thought never crossed his mind, but with Rin—

Well. Caring was easier he was young and she was the voice of his conscience.

How much could have been avoided? The alley where the man was found dead four years ago is, admittedly, also on route to his apartment, but she probably wouldn’t have been walking home alone at night. Would having adults to talk to help? Handling the aftermath of the Tsukuyomi on her own clearly didn’t work well. Would she already have had friends—gotten along with Sakura and Naruto before they were a team, a predestined makeup regardless of their instructor? Would he understand what to say to her when things went wrong?

He thinks about that. He thinks about that a lot.

 

 

Sakura goes with Sasuke to Suna a gennin in December, and returns a chuunin in January, alone. “She stayed behind for the Kazekage’s appointment,” Sakura says when Kakashi congratulates her on her promotion during the annual post-exam festival. Her kimono is the same color as the sunset, a clear contrast to his own drab, grey yukata. “I don’t know how, but she got permission for it. I think someone, like, requested her officially because ‘international relations’ or something like that.”

“Makes sense,” he says at the time, though he’s mildly surprised she agreed to stay rather than return for Sakura’s celebration. “So, anything noteworthy?”

Past that mild surprise, he thinks nothing of it until a month passes, and Sasuke’s called for her first joint mission—and then called for a second, and a third, while simultaneously accepting solo positions here in Konoha. Suddenly, six months go by, it’s another Midsummer, and he realizes he’s only been on three missions with her since the exams. When he sees her next, in her sunlit yellow main room before she leaves for Suna, that amount of time seems longer than half a year. Her hair is longer, held back in a loose bun kept together with a pencil. Her pants are the typical Konoha khaki with a thousand pockets, but her shirt is an airy linen dyed imported red, which costs more money here than she’s usually willing to spend. It’s from Suna, where that same color’s cheap. She’s dressed for  _ Suna. _

She’s packing when he comes by, stuffing a single outfit into a bag without bothering to fold it with the same carelessness Naruto had. “What’s up?” she says with a quick glance behind her before returning to her task. “I thought you were in the borderlands this week.”

“We came back early.” He was on a two person mission with Kurenai, a loosely undercover one that required acting like a couple and dying his hair a dull brown that stubbornly refuses to leave the grey. “Thought I’d stop by before you left.”

When she straights and turns, he realizes she’s even grown an inch or two. “Good,” she says, folding her arms and leaning against the back of her futon. “I thought I wouldn’t get to see you. That’d make it, what, a month and a half? Are you aware your eyebrows are two different colors?”

Sighing, he says, “Sadly, yes. When’re you heading back?” She shrugs. “Seriously?”

“Last time I was in Suna I had to go on a mission before I even got back,” she says, and rolls her eyes. “That’s why I’m never here. But I hear you’re not really here ever either, so.”

She leaves the sentence there, left for him to complete on his own. When she’s here, he’s outside the walls, and when he’s on leave, she’s gone. In the time their mismatched schedule kept them from seeing one another, she lost some of the tension he didn’t notice always sat heavy on her shoulders.

“A village doesn’t rebuild its ranks in a year and a half,” he says, running his hand through discolored hair. The mission was short, just meant for scouting and observation, but that loose cover took preparation; he and Kurenai both had to fit the appearance of borderlands farmers, and he can feel the effects of the rapid weight loss even now, exhausting him after a long night returning home. “When do you leave?”

Not until tomorrow morning,” she says, looking him over from head to foot as though noticing the change in his appearance for the first time. “How bad was it?”

With a shrug of his own, he says, “More annoying than anything else. How’re you doing?”

She turns away to tighten the pack and snap shut the straps. “Better than the last time you saw me,” she says after a moment. “And you?”

“Overworked,” he says. “Missing my bed. Missing decent food. Contemplating my life choices. You know. The usual.”

“Overworked?” she says. He sees her smile in the window’s pale reflection, barely visible in the sunlight. “Yeah. I get that.”

“How’s Suna?” It’s the question he’s avoided asking even in the few instances they  _ have  _ seen each other, because he’s part of a generation that never had “joint missions,” and the idea of them is still an uncomfortable one.

Again, she pauses before answering. “I have a feeling you won’t like my answer,” she says eventually, cautiously, that relaxed casualness fading from her posture. After he carefully insists that’s not true, she says, “I really like it. Not just Gaara and Temari and Kankuro. Suna in general’s just nice. Even the people are friendlier.”

That’s not a common comment about Suna, that the people are friendly. Usually people return complaining that the culture is too rigid about its traditions, and that the village officials don’t negotiate easily. Konoha is friendly. Suna isn’t meant to know the meaning of the word.

For all people to return contradicting the stereotype, Uchiha Sasuke is the least expected.

“Good,” he says, even as a sense of wariness settles over him. In a month, she’ll be a clan head—a political official in her own right, whether she thinks of herself that way or not—and she needs to be careful about whom she trusts. “We’re going out to eat. Kurenai, Asuma, Gai, and I. Which of course means they’re bringing their teams. I’ll pay for your dinner if you distract them for me.”

Shaking her head, she says, “You’re terrible,” but still agrees, and follows him out the door.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kakashi just wants everyone to be okay, but no one is ever that lucky.

Mission requests begin asking for Team Seven specifically in October, once news of who its members are leaks to the international rumor mill. The trend lasts through fall and into winter, with Kakashi’s haphazard time with the girls broken by demands for specialty work that require his experience, or mandatory hospital hours, or calls from Suna. Sakura’s style changes in those months, no longer hesitating before an attack as she becomes desensitized in that way they do. The difficulty level of the missions allows her healing skills to improve, too, because none of them are careful, and require medical attention more often than not.

Meanwhile, Sasuke relies more and more on taijutsu, and in December, begins using a bo. Her style is familiar, though he can’t remember until January where he’d seen it before.

Nori, he realizes one day in the middle of the month, when they’re a hundred miles south of Konoha escaping the cold through a mission involving the spice trade, and he watches her catch a man behind his knees before knocking him in the neck. The technique is a twisted imitation of Chiku Nori’s, the man behind the ANBU monkey mask.  Her greatest efforts to insist she learned the weapon style in Suna fails there. Last Kakashi knew, Chiku created that movement himself.

At the corner bar one day, when it’s half past two, snowing heavily, and the only other patron is the short black dressing wearing woman who always occupies the bartender’s full attention, Kakashi mentions his suspicious to Asuma. “She’s not talkative,” he says, “but she’s usually pretty upfront, so the fact that she never mentions her solo missions  _ is  _ weird.”

Asuma glances away from the snow coated window, looking to Kakashi out of the corner of his eye. “Anyone ever tell you that you’ve got a favoritism issue?” he says.

“What?” Kakashi says, brow knitting.

“She’s technically an adult,” Asuma answers. “You put  _ way  _ too much thought into her. What about Sakura? How’s she doing at the hospital these days? I get that she’s older, but she’s still the kid.”

“Sakura’s in line for a hospital merit certificate,” Kakashi says, miffed. It’s not favoritism. It’s just that Sakura keeps him updated on her day to life, sometimes with more detail than he needs, and she has parents to defend her against any political power play, should the situation ever arise. At thirteen, Sasuke might be a jounin and legal adult, but she’s vulnerable in a way the rest of her age group isn’t. “The Civilian Doctors’ Union is annoyed, but they’ll get over it. She’s good.”

Looking away again, Asuma says, “That’s not what I mean. If Sasuke’s really involved in the ANBU, then just stop tying yourself into knots over it. And who knows? She might’ve picked it up on the street. You really think they’d slot  _ her  _ in there at her age?”

Uchiha Itachi joined the ANBU at twelve, and killed his family a year later. The Council passed the Uchiha Act of 93 as a result, but all that means is that she’s too young to be Captain.

The large clock on the wall above the bar tick-tocks to two-thirty. “I guess you’re right,” Kakashi says, though the suspicious remains.

All through January and February and into March, that suspicious remains, until it’s the week of the Bingo Book Summit, and Sasuke presents a contract from the ANBU archives proving Shimura Danzo decreed her family needed to die. “I knew something was weird,” she says as he reads it over, forcing himself to concentrate through the throbbing in his head. He’s sick with a head cold, and has been for the past week. This isn’t a good time to learn one of the most traumatic events in Konoha’s recent history was carefully planned. “Itachi’s always been the good one. It’s just not like him.”

She stands in his living room, body quivering from adrenaline and anxiety, absentmindedly dressed in her ANBU training uniform. On the chair next to the couch sits Sakura, who scans the contract once Kakashi finishes and wraps himself tightly in the warm wool blanket Rin’s mother knit them over ten years ago. Today isn’t the day to learn Uchiha Itachi is innocent. Today isn’t the day to shatter his little sister’s hopes of having a family again. Hating him was easier; not just as a Konoha-nin, but as Sasuke’s sensei and friend, who knows what she went through growing up alone.

Unfortunately for her, the contract is entirely legal. She didn’t snag all of it, but she grabbed enough. Itachi agreed. Both sides had conditions. His mission isn’t done. Even if the village didn’t entirely honor its deal to care for Sasuke, she’s here and she’s healthy. For any government official, that’s enough so long as Itachi’s reports still come in regularly. It doesn’t help that she removed these from the archives without permission, even if her brother does have a higher price on his head than Orochimaru, and he’s sick with a hereditary illness killing slowly, and no thirteen-year-old should ever have to go through this.

When he explains all this, her eyes water and she swallows hard, but she doesn’t cry. He should have seen this, he thinks. “You two have talked,” he says, which is treason for both, but even a massacre can’t stop the two of them from caring about each other, clearly. “How many times?”

She bites the inside of her cheek, caving it in. “A few times,” she says.

“Of all the—” He starts to say, before cutting himself off to cough into his elbow. “He’s a missing-nin.”

“No he’s not,” she says.

“You didn’t know that,” he says, tone harsher than he intends, so she quiets, and for a moment, all he can hear is his own rattling breathing.

Maybe his attitude towards her isn’t caused by favoritism, or maybe it is, but his concern for her is more pronounced than what he feels for Sakura or Naruto. “Try to leave the ANBU,” he tells her after another solid ten minutes of arguing where he and Sakura finally convince her to return the paperwork to where it belongs. “It’s bad for you for more reasons than—”

“I don’t think Shimura-san will let me,” she says flatly, and cites the reason as classified.

Whatever her reason is for staying, Kakashi knows with a frightening certainty that ANBU will be the death of her or worse.

Naruto and Jiraiya return in late June, seven days before Midsummer.

“He went to go see the girls first,” Jiraiya says, waking Kakashi on the first day of his leave just past ten in the morning. “Sure he’ll get around here by dinnertime. How’s it been going? How’re the kids?”

“Well, according to them,” he answers, starting a pot of coffee, “they aren’t kids anymore. They’re good. Sakura’s at the hospital warding off hormonal boys and jealous medical-nin all day. Sasuke’s clan head.”

“Warding off?” Jiraiya says, removing a couple of mugs from the cabinet above the sink. Grey light sneaks through the window, teasing a threat of rain later in the day. “Isn’t she fifteen? I would’ve thought she’d found herself a boyfriend by now. Or girlfriend. Whatever she’s into.”

Though she isn’t hasn’t confirmed or denied his suspicions, Kakashi privately thinks his student is “into” both. Lately her fights with Ino have been less than platonic. “Of course that’s what you’d focus on,” he says, annoyed, because it’s too early to deal with the older man’s preoccupation with teenagers’ love lives. 

Shrugging, Jiraiya says, “Is anything else really noteworthy? Medical-nin are always bitching about someone, and Uchiha’s position is a birthright. But you should’ve heard Naruto yammering on about them. Do you know how much I know about Sakura’s mother’s cooking? It’s depressing.”

“The praise is well deserved.” Kakashi yawns into his elbow. “So did you really think his landlord was going to sell his apartment, or did he just pester you too much into returning?”

Supposedly, Jiraiya and Naruto came back to Konoha before their allotted three year training sabbatical because all landlords who rent post-orphan housing apartments are bastards. “Eh, bit of both,” Jiraiya says as the coffee pot dings. “We ran into Uchiha a couple months ago and he’s been relentless about finishing early ever since. You know how he is. Finding out she’s a jounin kicked off his competitive streak.”

Kakashi pours them both a cup, and takes a glorious sip that wakes him instantly. “Well, I’m not complaining,” he says. “Konoha’s too quiet without Naruto running his mouth.”

“I guess,” Jiraiya says, unenthusiastic, but doesn’t argue, and leaves to see Tsunade after finishing his coffee.

Around nightfall, once Sasuke’s left for Suna and Sakura for another shift at the hospital, Naruto swings by with a smile and new stories. “Jiraiya’s really cool and all,” he says more than once, “but you know, I missed you guys a lot.” Despite Kakashi’s best efforts, he’s pleased to hear that.

Though they’re both chuunin, he returns to training the two of them, and Sasuke’s absence never damages the dynamic. True, the three of them are good together, and true, she’s been on missions with both of them, but for the first time, he realizes that his team is badly fractured. Sakura and Naruto became friends first, back when Sasuke wasn’t receptive to much of anything, and even after two years of personalized training with a couple legendary sannin, they still aren’t on her level. As early as day two, when they repeat the bell test and his students do genuinely to win, he’s forcefully confronted with realization that the likelihood that they’ll work as a team again any time soon is frighteningly slim. Three people is enough for a mission; Sasuke won’t need to come along on any more Team Seven requests now that Naruto’s here.

He’s thinking about this at the end of July, right around Sasuke’s fifteenth birthday, as he teaches his students about nature transformations and chakra control in theory more than practice. That’s when a crow Summon abruptly appears in a puff of smoke on his shoulder to croak out coordinates and cry for help. 

“This is bullshit,” Sakura says hours later in the privacy of Tsunade’s office, voice raised as she stares at the Hokage of Konoha, at her boss, her teacher. “What type of fucking, bureaucratic nonsense is this—”        

Naruto, overlapping her, is saying, “She’s  _ Uchiha Sasuke.  _ Doesn’t that mean anything?”

Kakashi wants to protest along with them, but there’s a rushing in his ears like a scream’s been trapped inside him. Those coordinates were for the border of the Land of Sound. The Council, who can override Tsunade’s mission decrees, just declared that sending a rescue party would be too dangerous. With the utmost regret, of course. This is what Kakashi’s been afraid of since she left on her first solo mission. That she’d go down by the Land of Sound. What he hadn’t expected was that he’d get fucking  _ red tapped  _ before he can save her. 

“I’d do something if I could,” Tsunade says, and he knows it isn’t her fault, that the civilian Council members made the final decision, the civilian Council members whose names appeared on the contract Sasuke stole from the ANBU archives. If Shimura Danzo hadn’t been one of the few advocating for a rescue party, Kakashi would assume they knew that she knew, and this was all an attempt to keep her quiet. 

“You’re the Godaime,” Sakura says, back tense. “Fight for her.”

It takes two weeks before they gain permission, and on the day Team Seven and a small party of others are set to leave, a message comes in from Suna claiming she’s with them, injured but alive. By the time they’re finally allowed to leave Konoha’s walls to retrieve her, it’s September, a full month and a half after the crow appeared, and they walk into Suna to find the Kazekage missing, his brother poisoned, half the city destroyed, and Kakashi’s worst nightmare realized in the form of a medical report. 

The Kazekage’s sister warns them about genjutsu and unknown side effects, which manifests themselves in the worst panic attack Sasuke’s had to date as she perceives Team Seven a threat. After Sakura applies what she calls a “mental bandage” to temporarily stop the effects and leaves to heal a poisoned teenager, a dark haired woman dressed in a blazer inappropriate for the weather appears in the doorway. He and Naruto sit perched on the edge of her bed, where she lies unconscious on her side, fainted from stress. When the woman enters, Kakashi looks up and Naruto doesn’t. 

“My name is Noa,” she says, pulling out the desk chair and taking a seat. “You must be Hatake Kakashi and Uzumaki Naruto.” When they both confirm, she adds, “Okay. Uzumaki, I’m sorry to do this you, but I’m going to ask you to leave for a few minutes.”

For the first time, he looks away from Sasuke, moving jerkily. “What? No,” he says, scowling. “She’s my  _ friend _ . You can’t just tell—”

“Naruto, leave.”

“What?”

At fifteen, and after spending most of his career away from active duty, he isn’t equipped to recognize a psychologist on sight. “Friend” isn’t a good enough excuse to break doctor-patient confidentiality laws, but as her old sensei, Kakashi must, in a twisted way, count as her guardian. Naruto can yell at him later.

After a tense moment, he does leave, grumbling about the injustice of it all. Sasuke curls into a tighter ball. Above her is a wind chime that sings every time the slow breeze coming through the open window moves its ceramic shapes. One of the wardrobe doors is partially open, kept that way by a short blue dress on a hanger that he can’t imagine is hers. On the desk next to Noa the psychologist’s elbow is a picture of the Kazekage’s siblings bundled in blankets and sweaters, half covered in mist. There’s a wall hanging above it now dappled in sunlight portraying a mountain scene, a haiku about flowers that he thinks might be a metaphor for love scribbled in the corner. 

Sasuke never mentioned where she stayed in Suna beyond that first offer to let her use the guest room. Regardless of the situation, Kakashi still manages to find how much this is space is  _ hers  _ deeply disquieting. 

“How bad is it?” he asks once his student’s gone. The woman at the desk stares at him blankly, scrutinizing, watching for his reaction. 

After an uncomfortably long moment, she answers, “It’s bad, to put it mildly. Technically, we’re only allowed to have this discussion because the genjutsu makes her a danger to your village, but, in my opinion, it’s in her best interest that the people she’s close to know what happened.” She explains, without lessening the severity of the information, that his old student—his, dammit all,  _ favorite student _ —just spent fourteen days as the hostage of pedophile. “She has a history,” Noa continues, matter a fact. “Her reactions make that much obvious. And I think if anyone knows about it, it’s probably you.”

“Yeah,” he says, breaking Sasuke’s confidence as surely as the doctor. Even after several weeks’ recovery, her bones are too prominent, her clothes too baggy. She’s a stick figure drawing of a teenage girl. “She has a history. Any suggestions?”

“Don’t leave her on her own for long gaps of time,” the woman says, folding her arms. Sweat gathers along her hairline. “She presumably won’t appreciate that, but the worst thing for her might be alone time for a while. Force your hospital to get her a psychologist if you have to instead of everyone trying to deal with it without a professional. And keep an eye on her if you end up on a mission together. Her team here is getting the same warning. I’ve never seen her fight, but I’ve heard enough about her to know it’ll be disastrous, if not deadly, if she has a flashback out in the field.”

He reaches out to move Sasuke’s hair from her face, but lets it drop when he thinks about how much she wouldn’t want to be touched. Holding her still earlier so Sakura could undo whatever fucked up ideas Orochimaru forced into her head was bad enough. “Is there anything in specific that might set her off?”

“Other than what I assume already does?” she answers. “I don’t know. The genjutsu isn’t manifesting around us, so we don’t know what it does. And it depends on how well the Godaime’s able to heal her. It’s past our medics’ skill sets.” 

Again, unwillingly, he takes a sweeping glance around the room. There’s a bookshelf covered with novels instead of scrolls, and on top, a recent candid photo someone snapped of Sasuke and the Kazekage’s sister, both in pajamas, both caught mid-laugh. The psychologist watches him make his observation with sharp brown eyes, and says, “She’s a citizen now. It’s official. It was the only way they could legally force her to see me.”

When Konoha’s Council hears this, they’ll be livid, but he just nods. “They made the right choice,” he says. “Thank you for telling me.” 

Her gaze drifts away from him to Sasuke’s too-skinny figure. “I’m going to go,” Noa the Suna psychologist says, standing. Just before she exits, already half out the door, she adds, “Just listen to her. She’ll talk to you before anyone else. I think.”

_ I think.  _ As she exits, he looks back at the wall hanging.  _ Evening orchid _ , it reads.  _ The white of its flower/hidden in its scent.  _ Maybe it was already here. Maybe one of the Kazekage’s siblings, or the Kazekage himself, gave it to her. 

By the time she finally stirs, the sun’s dipped below the horizon, and Sakura and Naruto have left again to find food. He half expects her to scream again, to panic, but she just blinks her sleepy, dark blue eyes, and says, “Kakashi?”

“Yeah, kid,” he says, and smiles weakly. “I’m here.” 

She blinks, slower, and twists so her oversized shirt rides up, revealing scars old and new, but she doesn’t move to sit. Instead, she says, “Good,” and stretches out her arm to take his hand as she shuts her eyes and drifts back to sleep.

 

 

Sasuke asks, six weeks after she returns from Suna and several days after she’s reinstated, “Are people afraid of me?”

It’s a Saturday just after the turn of the season. Three hours ago, Team Seven returned from a mission in the Land of Waves, but here she is in Kakashi’s kitchen already, her hair wet from a shower and dressed in a sweater that fit her before Midsummer. He sets down a mug of hot tea on the counter in front of her and asks, “Where’s this coming from?” 

Before answering, she takes a sip, and scrunches her nose at the heat. Then she frowns. “It’s just something the Godaime said,” she says as he spins his too-hot mug in his hands, waiting for it to cool. “I asked her if I could have a permission slip to override the other team getting the mission, but she said I didn’t need one because the advisory board would just  _ do _ it _. _ ”

“Well, they did.”

“Yeah. They did.” 

Yeah, they did. Kakashi already had a mission report in his hand, something close and far below his team’s skill set, when she breezed past them without a word and asked for the one meant for Tori Ryuu, a long established jounin, instead. Tori protested; Kakashi, Naruto, and Sakura exchanged confused glances; all Sasuke had to say was “Well?” and the advisory board did as she asked. Tori stopped arguing.

And now she’s in his kitchen past ten at night. She’s too young for this bullshit, he thinks, and shoves away the sneaking thought that even when Minato was alive, Kakashi never would have been able to pull off something like that. He doesn’t know if  _ Itachi  _ could.

“So?” she says. “Is she right? Are people afraid of me.”

Kakashi sips his tea. It scalds his tongue despite how long he waited. “A little, probably,” he says. 

“Why?”

Though it shouldn’t, the question throws him because for some reason, he hadn’t expected her to push. “I don’t know,” he says after a moment. A rain droplet hits the window, followed by another. “Child prodigies always make people uncomfortable, I guess.” 

Even if Kakashi’s never actively acknowledged it, he thinks he might be among the ranks of people who find Sasuke a little terrifying. It’s not just her skill level, even if that’s a large determining factor—Itachi was a prodigy as well as Shisui, and so was Kakashi himself. It’s more that she owns her family legacy and her position in the village in a way her brother never did, or could, maintains friendships that cross state borders, and skyrocketed from a gennin to an ANBU before the age of fourteen. Realistically, it’s no wonder that even Council members listen to her, despite what should have professional and social disgrace. Itachi never had that power, Shisui never had it, and Kakashi certainly never did. The difference between them and her, at least recently, is that she’s learned how to charm others into trusting her without realizing it.

That’s what’s terrifying. That she’s young, prodigal, and can make a person forget anyone ever labelled her a ghost story _.  _

She sighs, and her shoulders droop. “Guess I shouldn’t be surprised,” she says, voice low. “People’ve been saying I’m crazy since before my graduation.” 

With a sigh of his own, Kakashi says, “That’s not why. And you know you’re not crazy.”

“Tell that to my psychologist,” she says to her tea.

“I had to see a psychologist,” he says, and sets his own mug back on the counter. “After the War. I’m not crazy, am I?” He doesn’t mention that he was actually forced  _ twice _ , first then continuing to the Kyuubi attack’s aftermath, and then another round after Rin’s death. Though the first time was useless, he’s grudgingly willing to admit all these years later that the second helped. 

There’s a brief pause. Then she says, “How’d you get out of it?” 

“I didn’t,” he answers. “I was stuck going for the mandatory year or I would’ve been discharged from service. Afterwards I opted out of continuing.” 

“They didn’t give a damn when I was a kid,” she says. Outside, the rain picks up, pattering hard against the window. Their shadows distort on the far wall. She says, “It’s bullshit.”

“You have to talk to someone,” he says, suddenly feeling weighted by his own experience, by her trauma, by how much life he’s lived at the not-so-old age of thirty. 

Frowning again, she says, “It’s not as bad as you think. I just want to forget.”

“Sasuke—”

“ _ No _ ,” she interrupts, finally looking at him, her eyes wide despite the harshness in her voice. “Look, Kakashi, I—I’ve been—I went through this before. I know how to handle it. And I was—I was doing _ so much better. _ ”

A few weeks after Rin died, Kakashi and Gai got drunk in the safety of the other man’s apartment, and he told his friend that he just wanted to forget. It’s not the same, but Kakashi knows how Sasuke’s feeling, which is why it’s also baffling that she isn’t worse. “You were,” he says as his clock ticks from  _ 10:59  _ to  _ 11:00 _ . “Are. But pretending you’re fine won’t help.”

There’s another pause, longer this time. “What do you want me to say?” she asks. “That I feel scared all the time? That I can’t stop  _ feeling _ —” She cuts herself off, takes a deep breath, and continues, “My head’s not screwed up anymore. I’m not, okay. So I’m not great, but I’m fine. I feel safe. Here. Enough. I guess. I guess I just—I want everyone else to forget too, you know? But they won’t, because I fucked up.”

In Suna, they love her so much that the boy can’t touch anyone can hug her right around the middle and a respected elder refused to follow anyone but her into the field. Here in Konoha, she can scare at the shit out of people for her political power and bright-eyed intelligence, but the prevailing attitude around her remains an overbearing sense that she must be protected and avenged. 

So she isn’t a ghost story anymore, maybe, but every village has its favorite tragedy, and Sasuke is theirs. 

“No one blames you,” he says, and means it, though wishes he hadn’t removed his mask, knowing his expression must be transparent. “It’s late. You should get some sleep. Do you want me to walk you home? Is Sakura there? Would you rather stay here?” His guest room already has a mix of both girls’ clothes and jointly used shampoo in the closet, two toothbrushes, and a couple spare towels that unofficially belong to them. There’s a smaller collection of his friends’ things, Gai and Asuma and Kurenai, and he’s sure Naruto’s will migrate in there soon enough; everyone in their profession leaves bits and pieces of themselves in multiple locations. 

Her gaze flits to the window as thunderless lightning strikes across the sky, momentarily chasing away the shadows across her face and highlighting the scar on her cheek Itachi left her years ago. “There’s no point in us both getting wet,” she says, placing her mug down next to his, “and yeah, Sakura’s there. I should go back so she doesn’t get worried.”

“I haven’t showered yet,” he says, which is true. “A little rain doesn’t bother me.” 

With a shrug that’s more a jerk of her shoulders, Sasuke says, “Fine. If you get sick, it’s your own fault.” 

“I’m willing to take the risk.”

They walk the few short blocks to her apartment tucked beneath the same umbrella, battered from rain on their exposed sides and gathering mud on their shoes. When they reach their destination, Sakura opens the door like she was waiting for them, and Sasuke darts inside with a mumbled “see you later.” 

“Thanks for walking her home,” Sakura says, as though it’s something  _ Sasuke  _ needs but not her when in reality, she’s still just sixteen. A teenage girl in a world that’s out to get people like her. 

Despite himself, Kakashi’s thoughts return to another medical-nin who’s occupied his mind all evening, about how she was only a year older than Sakura is now when she died. “Playing the chaperone is the point behind old guys like me,” he says, the lightness forced, but Sakura thankfully only rolls her eyes and wishes him goodnight before shutting the door.

 

 

The mission in the Land of Waves is the last one Sasuke has with Team Seven before she’s sent exclusively on ANBU assignments, so that for the first time, Kakashi starts thinking of her as separate entity. During the next few months, he and his team—the team that consists of he, Sakura, and Naruto—are sent out regularly, completing missions easy and challenging alike in an effort to gain Naruto the field experience he needs. 

“What’d you mean, I need ‘field experience?’” he said after Kakashi explained why they had three missions in a row inside the Land of Fire’s borders. He frowned full forced, whisker marks twisting. “Sasuke got to argue herself out of probation. Isn’t this kind of like the same thing? I trained for like two and half whole years. That has to count for something, right?”

“I had to do the same thing,” Sakura said, who admitted, bluntly, once she and Kakashi were alone that she was pissed that she needed to go through this again. “Training isn’t the same as fieldwork.” 

What she doesn’t say, and what Kakashi doesn’t say, and what Naruto either doesn’t acknowledge and doesn’t realize is that there’s a war coming. Their missions are protection-based out on the borderlands, pleas for help from skittish businessmen or small town politicians that sometimes yield nothing, but usually not. Whether it’s Iwa-nin or Kiri-nin, Kakashi and his team are suddenly fighting low level chuunin and gennin cells. The weakness feels calculated. 

Meanwhile, reports start filtering through the international rumor mill about sociopolitical unrest in Oto.

The climate in the Land of Fire, stretching out from Konoha to the borders, is an anxious one, but Naruto’s decidedly separate from that. “I don’t get it,” he says in late November, in what will be their last mission before they return home to act as additional protection for the chuunin exams. “Why does Iwa even care about greenhouses?”

Currently, they’re in a village with an old dialect name Kakashi can’t pronounce thirty miles from the Land of Earth’s border, where the locals are repairing the destroyed greenhouses where they store their bulbs and citrus trees for the window. “Because if the produce in there dies,” he says, leaning on his shovel, “then Konoha’s market price for fruit will inflate.”

“If they want to attack food sources,” Naruto says, patting down the earth with his foot, “wouldn’t it make more sense to go straight for the grain? Or, I don’t know, the livestock? Not everyone eats tangerines.” 

“It would,” Kakashi says, “but the Land of Fire’s main farms are still too far into the interior.” 

Before Naruto can answer, Sakura jogs over from Greenhouse Five, where a group of men and women work to refit a glass panel into one of the roof’s metal frames. There’s metal dust and dirt splattered across her clothes and a smudge of white paint on her chin. She has her hair back with a handkerchief instead of her forehead protector like one of the local women. Neither Kakashi nor Naruto are dressed anymore officially, both borrowing clothes from the workers, even if their main task today was digging graves for gennin cell they killed.

For the town’s dead, they burned the corpses, but there are few instances where the enemy are given the same courtesy. 

“Mostly everything’s saved,” she says, rubbing her shoulder. “I mean, not the bulbs, but those were just flowers for the most part. Nanoka-san’s wondering if we can set up traps around the town’s perimeter.” 

“Won’t Iwa expect that if they come back?” Naruto says, and throws his shovel across his shoulders. 

Shrugging, she says, “Not if we’re smart about it.” 

Across the field, Hiroshi, the head builder, suddenly berates his young apprentice, who has his lips wrapped around the side of his thumb. Kakashi watches the spectacle with a bland sort of interest as the other workers ignore them, clearly used to their antics. “It’s a good precaution anyway,”  he says. Before the Suna invasion, before Konoha’s numbers were severely depleted, a better solution would’ve been leaving someone here undercover to act as a guard, but that’s no longer an option. 

They set a series of tripwires and explosives, and leave Nanoka, the village’s governor, with explicit instructions on how to contact the nearest active outpost. By the time they return, it’s a week before the start of the exams. The other villages’ representatives arrive the same day. For Suna, that means the Kazekage’s older sister. 

The following morning is the first time Kakashi and Sasuke see each other for more than a half hour in over a month. “It’s not even that cold,” she’s saying when he joins Naruto and the group of girls at training ground four, the area his team’s been using like a private park since they were twelve. “You are weak, Temari.”

There’s a laugh in her voice and though she’s mostly turned away, he still catches the edge of her smile. Naruto spots him first and mouths “what the fuck?”

“I read the weather report,” Temari says, one eyebrow quirked so it disappears under her bright red hat. “It’s supposed to snow all next week. That’s fucking cold, Uchiha.” 

“Hey, someone back me up on this one,” Sasuke says, twisting towards Naruto and Sasuke and gaze landing on Kakashi instead. “Oh, come on, your scarf really isn’t helping my argument.” 

He isn’t bundled as tightly as Temari, who’s wrapped in a parka with mittens and hat and scarf that all mismatch, but he isn’t as young as the others, and cold cuts through him in a way it hadn’t a few years ago. A fuzzy woolen scarf wrapped around his face and a decent winter coat is the least he can do. “Well, she’s not wrong,” he says, which only prompts Sasuke to roll her eyes with all the exaggerated drama of an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl. “Hi, Temari.”

“Nice to see you, Kakashi,” Temari says, and chatters her teeth. 

As a new burst of wind gusts by, rattling bare tree branches and swirling beneath their coats, she wiggles closer to her friend on their shared log and Sasuke doesn’t shy away. Sakura sits beside them, a little apart, and Naruto occupies a spot on the ground, leaning against the space of log between the two girls’. Neither he nor Sasuke are dressed for the cold, though Sakura intelligently wore a winter coat and mittens.

Kakashi stays on his feet, turning into a popsicle with each new blast of wind. 

“The lake froze over a couple of days ago apparently,” Sakura says, jerking her head behind her to the body of water, “so it’s probably thick enough to run around on. We’re going to do that then make hot chocolate.” 

“With marshmallows,” Naruto adds, very seriously.

Though Sasuke and his team are looking at him imploringly, and Temari more or less indifferently, Kakashi can’t bring himself to partake in an activity like that with people their age. “I have plans,” he says, which isn’t strictly speaking a lie. Earlier he ran into Asuma and Kurenai, who invited him over for dinner. “I came by to see how you’re doing, Sasuke. It’s been a while.”

He keeps it at that, because he doesn’t want to say,  _ I needed to make sure you were okay because the last time we really spoke you asked me if people were afraid of you _ , or  _ objectively I know you’re safe but I need to see it to believe it.  _ Sometimes he has nightmares where she never reached Suna, or about the look on her face when she saw him in her bedroom there and was so scared she couldn’t scream. In the past few weeks, he’s spent a depressing about of time worrying that she’ll disassociate on a mission; for the past few months, he’s spent a depressing amount of time thinking about Asuma’s claim that Kakashi had an issue with favoritism, and how he’s right. 

When her nose scrunches, the change in expression barely detectable, Temari adjusts herself so their knees touch and still Sasuke doesn’t move. “I’m fine,” she says with just a little too much emphasis as her hands go to her pockets. “How are you doing? Bored out of your mind? Naruto and Sakura’ve been telling me about how easy all your missions are.”

“There are worse things to be than bored,” he says, shrugging, as Naruto stretches and his back pops. 

They talk idly for fifteen minutes or so before he excuses himself. Over the next few weeks, he spends most of the time with his friends and speaks with the kids sparingly, always interrupted by political bullshit and his newly assigned, technically illegal mission that involves spying on the Kiri diplomats and participants. But the exams end without incident, followed by a traditional ceremony and celebration where everyone gets drunk, Gai fails at flirting with every other potentially gay man he meets, and Kakashi may or may not end up in bed with Anko. 

At some point in the very early hours of the morning, when he’s on his way home in his hastily tied yukata and no coat, he takes a seat on the half wall by the public park and somehow isn’t surprised when Sasuke pops up like a daisy and joins him. She’s still in her kimono, a dark blue one that matches the dark blue of his yukata and patterned with sweeping ocean scenery, but her hair’s down and snow splattered, stuck to her face. He left his mask at Anko’s, and struggles to get air into his lungs. Every time they breath, they release bursts of condensation that twist through the air like cold smoke. 

“I have no idea where Sakura is right now,” she says before he can ask for an explanation, if he was even going to ask for one, “and forgot my key. What’re you doing out here?”

He blinks. “I think I had a lot to drink,” he says, because he isn’t going to tell Uchiha Sasuke about his sex life. Though he doesn’t see from where, she procures a water bottle and pushes it into his hand. “Thanks. Where’s Temari?”

“She and the other Suna-nin just left,” Sasuke answers, swinging her feet like a pendulum. “It’s the wet season there, so they have to beat the weather. I was walking back from saying goodbye and saw you. On a wall. At four in the morning.”

Is it really four in the morning? Somehow, it feels both earlier and later, as though four in the morning is a time that doesn’t truly exist. He takes a long drink, the water burning in its coldness as it moves down his throat, and when he moves the bottle away says, “I just...needed a second. Before heading back.”

Skeptically, she says, “Uh-huh,” and adds, “Need help? I’m tired as fuck anyway.” 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea,” he says, though it’s already too hard to breathe and having someone to lean on might be his only way home.

Her face goes blank. “Whatever,” she says after a moment, hopping down from the wall so her boots crunch through the snow and her kimono pools on top. “I can’t be the first person who’s had to help a very drunk ex-sensei home before.” 

It’s four in the morning on the day after the chuunin exam celebration, and he’s drunk while she’s part of an organization with a reputation that promotes irresponsible use of mind-altering substances, but she might have a point. “Okay,” he says, sliding off, and doesn’t resist when she slides one of his arms around her shoulders. “You,” he continues, though the words come out breathless and thinking is a bit of hazy, “are very hard to get a hold of lately, you know that?”

“And you have no brain to mouth filter right now.” They trek through the snow, which is hard packed from previous footsteps, and make slow progress. 

“I only mean—” He breaks off to cough, then continues, “This isn’t how I thought we’d end up talking.” Maybe that was too blunt, he thinks vaguely, but she doesn’t seem fazed. 

“It’s not like we’ve been preoccupied or anything,” she says. “Do I even want to know where you lost your mask?”

With a grimace, he says, “No,” and sluggishly works to change the subject. 

Sasuke beats him to it. “You guys didn’t all need to dance around us,” she says chidingly, like he’s her age and participating in local teen drama. “Temari and me. I’m not really like two separate people. Naruto was just exaggerating when he said that.”

“He said that? I didn’t hear him say that.”

“Yeah, the first night.”

Again, Kakashi coughs, turning away to press his mouth into his shoulder. Every inhale sounds like a wheeze. “He’s not entirely wrong,” he says, and regrets it immediately. 

“What does that mean?” She goes on the defensive immediately, but doesn’t back away as they turn onto his street. 

He fumbles with his keys and doesn't protest when she huffs dramatically before taking them from his hand. As they reach his apartment complex’s perimeter, he says, “Your attitude changes. You’re not a little storm cloud anymore.” When they come to the stairs, he stops, focusing on breathing evenly and not falling over the rail. 

“I guess,” she says, and leaves it at that until they're up the stairs and down the hall, and she has his door open. “I'm using your spare room. Stay here.”

Though he can function on his own, he thinks, he still leans back against the door. A draft blows against his ankles. Sasuke slips into the bathroom and emerges a moment later with his rarely used inhaler and allergy medication. One hit, two pills, and his chest starts to loosen. 

Unfortunately, his head is no less muddled. “Thanks,” he says once he catches his breath. According to the clock on his wall, it's nearly five AM. “Now go to sleep.”

“Great.” She turns away so the hem of her kimono flurries against his carpet, and renters the bathroom for the sake of personal hygiene with a backwards wave and absentminded “goodnight.”

 

 

In March, the shinobi Council issues the new Bingo Books. Kakashi doesn’t make it, forgetting about the meeting entirely and focusing instead on an early morning, one-on-one training session for Naruto. Just as they finish and he calls it a day, Jiraiya appears from the post-sunshower mist carrying three thin black books. 

Without fanfare, he hands Kakashi two. “How long’ve you been out here?” he says, attention already turned to Naruto as Kakashi asks why he has an extra. When his student answers they came around six, Jiraiya gapes. “How in hell did you pry him out of bed that early, Kakashi?”

“We’ve  _ always  _ trained early,” Naruto says, rocking back on his heels. It’s chilly, but his jacket’s still off in an effort to cool down, so goosebumps prickle across his arms. Kakashi, who never removed his layers, overheats. “You’re the one who slept in all the time.”

Before Jiraiya can argue, Kakashi waves the two Bingo Books so they flap unevenly, knocking together. “So are you going to tell me why I have two, or am I supposed to guess?”

“Uchiha never showed either.” There’s something wrong in the way he says it. Not flatly indifferent, but strained. Worried.

Kakashi glances down and to the side to Naruto, who glances back. As his student asks, “Did something happen?” Kakashi rifles through the pages, which are organized alphabetically. There are no new names, and the Uchiha siblings are two of the last. Itachi’s bounty’s unchanged, nothing noteworthy added, but  _ Sasuke _ —

“What the fuck?” He nearly drops the book, and doesn’t stop Naruto when he snatches it from his hands. 

“Is this a typo?” Naruto asks but Jiraiya, unfortunately, shakes his head. A cloud passes across the sun, casting a long shadow across the training ground. Behind him, the almost blossoming sakura tree shakes its branches. “But there were Konoha-nin there! Shouldn’t someone have said hey, no, that’s a bad idea? ‘Cause this is putting a target on her back, right?”

Holding up his hands, Jiraiya says, “Hey. It’s not good, but at least it doesn’t mention anything else. It’s not that unusual for ex-hostages to have that end up on their record. Especially for women. But did you notice who’s missing?”

In Kakashi’s preoccupation, he hadn’t paid attention to more than the Uchiha siblings, but now he runs through the pages backwards in his head. “Shit,” he says, feeling face lose color as the sun returns. “Orochimaru’s off?” 

“Wait, doesn’t that mean he’s dead?” Naruto says, shutting the book on Sasuke’s new, first photograph. It’s an official one from last year, which means someone from Konoha went prepared. “Isn’t that a good thing?”

On one hand, yes, it is, because Orochimaru was an international terrorist who kidnapped and brainwashed children, who killed the Sandaime, who kept Sasuke locked away for two weeks. Jiraiya tucks his hands in his pockets and says, “I’m not denying that is,” though he must, on some level, be grieving for the boy he once knew, “but Oto was already starting to go sideways. If they break out into a full Civil War because they have no leader, it’ll destabilize the whole region.” Sighing, he says, “All I wanted to do was finish my book.” 

Naruto’s face pinches. “Right,” he says, as though the book going unfinished wouldn’t be such a tragedy. Turning to Kakashi, he adds, “Uh, we should tell her, right? About all the new stuff and Orochimaru being dead and everything?”

In one update, Sasuke’s bounty jumped from the higher end of average to twice that of her brother, who has one of the largest in the book. She’s credited, rightly so, with Kabuto’s death and the death of two jinchuriki. She is, uniquely, classified as both a Konoha-nin and a Suna-nin; someone remembered to give her the title Head of the Uchiha Clan; next to the category  _ Weakness(es) _ reads,  _ Unknown. _

“I’ll tell her,” Kakashi says, reclaiming the Bingo Book from his student. “Give her a few hours, okay?”

“Wait, what, again?” Naruto flushes, so the whiskers seem to pop. “Kakashi-sensei, this isn’t some—what’s it called—confidentiality thing. I’m her  _ friend. _ Isn’t ‘support’ supposed to be a good thing?”

Kakashi wonders, briefly, if Naruto actually researched that, or if he and Sakura discussed it. “Just give her a few hours,” Kakashi says again, because support may be the psychologist-designated method of helped a person recover from emotional trauma, but Sasuke won’t want an audience if unexpected remnants of the genjutsu cause a panic attack. 

“Hey,” Jiraiya says, folding his arms, “don’t think you get out of running errands, kid. You can go by when you’re finished.”

Though Naruto clearly wants to continue protesting, he groans and concedes to defeat. Kakashi slips the books into his pocket and makes a note of where the sun is in the sky, surrounded but not covered by thin white clouds in its place above the trees. Just after eleven, by his estimate. Sasuke is awake by now, or should be, but she has nowhere to go today, so it’s unlikely she’ll leave the apartment. That at least gives him time to change out of his pollen-dusted training clothes.  

Later, she absorbs the news better than anticipated, though she worryingly woke up not long before he arrives, which was just around noon. Rather than panic, she’s all blank eyes and cicada-humming silences. He’s too afraid to leave her, so he stays until Sakura returns from her hospital shift around dinnertime with Naruto at her heel. Right before he shuts the front door, he catches sight of Sasuke flinching away when Sakura moves to touch her arm. In the steadily darkening apartment, they’re all pale as ghosts. 

It’s a few weeks before he sees eithers of the girls again for an extended period of time. Sakura’s hours at the hospital increase after she agrees to train newly hired nurses, a roundup that includes her friend Ino (“This is going to be  _ such  _ a disaster,” she said when she told him, but she still smiled). Meanwhile, Sasuke leaves for two ANBU missions back-to-back, and Iruka ropes Kakashi into substituting temporarily for an Academy instructor who needed to leave for a few weeks to convince his older sister living out in the countryside to return to active duty. Jiraiya, Naruto, and Kurenai and her team are the only ones consistently around. If she weren’t officially on maternity leave, likely those four would also be galavanting across the Land of Fire, if not beyond the borders. 

As a matter of circumstance, Naruto trains with them more days then not, and Kakashi joins when he can. “They’re getting good,” he says on the first Sunday in April when the Academy is closed and the weather fair. The sun beats down hotter than usual for this time of year, cracking training ground six’s hard packed dirt. 

“They are.” Kurenai taps her foot on the lower ridge of the rock the two of them made their seat, content to watch the mock battle rather than actively dictate. Though Kakashi won’t say it, even she has to realize that Naruto looks bored. 

“Any word yet on when they’re getting sent out again?” 

She shakes her head so her curls fall across her face. “It’s frustrating. And Hinata’s father, as always, is being a dick about it.”

Across the field, the mock battle rages without any sign of stopping soon. Kiba’s dog chases Shino’s bugs so they scatter, crushed under oversized paws. Hinata tries, and fails, to land a hit on Naruto, but succeeds in striking Kiba’s arm. Outside of a minimal use of the Kage Bunshin technique, Naruto predominantly fights with taijutsu and even then doesn’t work to his full capacity.

“Haven’t you recommended an alternative leader?” Kakashi asks, a little surprised. 

Shifting uncomfortably, his friend says, “Well, sort of. ‘Personal attachments’ means I can’t suggest Asuma or anyone on his traditional team until Konoha’s desperate, which sucks. I tried to suggest Neji since he  _ did  _ lead that one gennin cell a few weeks back, but he’s solidly on Team Gai at the moment. Everyone else is just too busy to take on a group of chuunin. Including you. And Sasuke’s...doing whatever the Godaime has her do.”

Naruto and Sakura left for one brief mission on their own, but it was to a town halfway to the border and they received special permission because people trust their skill level even as chuunin. Kakashi rests his elbows on his knees and watches his student run circles around Hinata to escape a line of bugs, confusing them. “She’s not trying very hard to hit him,” he says. Naruto may be participating with lackluster effort, but she’s certainly focusing more on her teammate even as he targets her.

“She never really grew out of her Academy years crush,” Kurenai says, unenthusiastic. “I’ve been attempting to coach her out of it, but it’s not as easy as you’d think.”

“Hinata and Naruto?” For some reason, the news is bamboozling. He spends enough time with Sakura to have stray suspicions and has to listen to her romance related woes, but he’s not Jiraiya, who pays too much attention to the younger generation’s relationships (or lack thereof). 

“More like Hinata for Naruto,” his friend says, watching as Naruto finally decides to take offense, and knock out Shino. “How is it that  _ your  _ team ended up the ones training with sannin?”

“Luck?”

“Hm.” She wraps her arms around her knees as Hinata strikes Kiba with a well aimed hit right in the back. “I told her to say something,” Kurenai continues as he collapses and the dog howls, “but she’s convinced he’s infatuated with one of the girls. That doesn’t seem true from what I’m seeing.”

“Not to my knowledge,” Kakashi says, and calls a stop to the fight, knowing Naruto won’t want to hurt Hinata so long as she avoids hurting him. “Okay, get some water and fix them up.” To Kurenai, he adds, “Look, I normally wouldn’t care—I get that this is to help her build a backbone, I’m assuming, and if she gets up the courage, great—but he just went from spending over two years with Jiraiya to dealing with the aftermath of Sasuke’s captivity a couple weeks after he got back. He’s not going to to know what to do if a friend comes up and declares her less-than-platonic feelings for him.”

Kurenai lets out a breath like a low whistle. “Well, when you put it like that, fuck. How’s he doing? And Sakura?”

It’s the first time Kakashi’s ever said the order of events out loud, that he really registers the timeline. “Not great at first, but it’s easier now,” he says, which he supposes is true enough. For two years, Naruto spent every day with a man who wrote literary porn and left him alone at least once, if not more, for “research.” He must have understood every term used in speculative rumors that spread the moment Sasuke returned.

Kakashi’s stomach twists.

As Kurenai says, “That’s good, I suppose,” Sakura appears from around the treeline, skidding to a stop so she nearly stumbles into Naruto and kicks up a cloud of dust. 

“I need you and you and you,” she says, breathless, motioning from Naruto to Kakashi to Kurenai. “Like right now.”

“What’s wrong?” Naruto asks as Hinata says, “Sensei?” and Kurenai and Kakashi stand. 

“I’ll tell you when we get there,” Sakura says, and shakes her head when the boys, still dazed, move as if it follow. “No, not you. Come on.”

“You two but not us?” Kiba says, scowling, as Kakashi and the others gather their things in a rush, preparing to leave Team Kurenai, sans its namesake, behind. “We’re the same rank. What kind of unfair shit is that?”

Kurenai says his name, sharp in warning. A few yards away, Kakashi hears Naruto quietly ask if something happened with Sasuke, and though Sakura says no, it doesn’t sound terribly convincing. “We need to go,” she says, and turns away without looking back. 

 

 

What Sakura didn’t say in front of Kurenai’s team—what she couldn’t say—is that the contract binding Uchiha Itachi to the world’s most dangerous infiltration mission isn’t as legal as it appeared, so now he’s coming back because the Akatsuki is going to attack Konoha. Uchiha Itachi is returning to Konoha, and the village will bleed for it. 

It’s a mess, his return. A faked fight, a panicked overnight at the girls’ apartment, a full disclosure in the early morning at a closed meeting. The five civilian Council members who signed off Itachi’s life take the blame, but not Shimura Danzo. Shimura does most of the talking, damning his conspirators. Kakashi focuses on the Uchiha siblings for most of the meeting, who say little, and wonders what the fuck Sasuke did to convince  _ Shimura Danzo  _ to do this. She looks cold in the meeting hall light. Colorless, thin, blank.

Ultimately, that’s why he offers up his spare bedroom. Legally, Sasuke and Itachi can’t live together for as long as she’s sent out as often as she is, and he, just maybe, feels guilty for not intervening earlier. 

Itachi moves in with a paper grocery bag of a few changes of clothes and hygiene essentials, all acquired courtesy of his sister within a short few hours. “Thank you,” he says, a bit awkward, as he stands in the middle of the room that was, for the most part, hers. In the past eight years, he grew, but he’s still average height, and his newly short hair is uneven where he hastily chopped it to fake a fight. At some point one of the girls will have to fix that. 

“It was me or Jiraiya,” Kakashi says bluntly, and leans against the doorframe, arms folded, analyzing the not-quite-missing-nin standing in his spare room. Outside the window, the moon’s steadily rising and the sky dark, casting long shadows across the walls. “Your sister and I decided I was probably the better choice.” What he doesn’t mention is that Jiraiya offered first, and Sasuke refused. 

“Still,” Itachi says, shifting his weight. “Thank you.” 

The last time he and Kakashi saw each other was the fight on the lake over three years ago when Itachi used the Tsukuyomi. Now his eyes are dark, not red—but also not  _ blue _ , not like Sasuke, a difference that’s more jarring than it should be. Just brown, tired, and ordinary. 

Shrugging, Kakashi says, “I doubt you’ll be hassle. But I haven’t moved anything around in here, so try not to be surprised by what you find. The kids like to use that closet like a storage space.” 

Itachi places the grocery bag on the bed. “Do they stay often?”

“Naruto and Sakura will only stay if we have an early morning mission,” Kakashi answers, “since I’m closer to the gate, but he’s responsible for the coffee stain on the comforter.” It’s white and thin, cheaply bought at the discount homegoods store on the other side of town, so he wasn’t as annoyed as he pretended. “Sasuke isn’t in Konoha a lot. She’ll stay if we’re catching up and she gets tired.”

The kids are a safe subject. Talking about their ANBU days, their common denominator, is too strange, and it doesn’t seem right to ask about the Akatsuki. Itachi, who clearly agrees, spends a moment too long analyzing the pale stain before saying again, “Thank you. Just...thank you.”

Kakashi nods, and pushes away from the doorframe. “Well, I’ll leave you to settle in,” he says. “We’re about to have a long week.”

When the Akatsuki attack, it’s less than a week later, and Konoha’s ill-prepared. Kakashi and Jiraiya search out its leader to kill while the others fight, dispersed across the village. At some point, after Suna reinforcements come, Kakashi shields Jiraiya from an oncoming attack, and wakes to find Tsunade nearly dead, and a known fifty-three casualties with eighty-four injured, both numbers raising steadily. 

Asuma and Iruka are among the dead. Sasuke is among the the injured. 

“I’m getting civilian widow’s compensation,” Kurenai says when he finds her huddled away alone in the trees, escaping medical tents and sheet-covered corpses and the acrid smell of blood, “because of the baby.” She laughs, the sound wet. “Can you believe that? Some doctor in sterile gloves told me that already. As if Konoha’s even going to have the money for that.” 

“Kurenai—”

With a breath that shakes her whole body, she says, “I think I just want to be by myself, Kakashi.” So, not knowing what else to do, he leaves her alone. 

Iruka’s surrounded by a crowd of students, young boys and girls with dirty faces and their own set of minor or not-so-minor injuries. The Hyuuga clan engulfs Neji with their grief. Hinata sobs, turned away, biting her hand. Others keep in huddles by their loved ones, heads bowed. After spending so long in the field, Kakashi recognizes most of them. 

Sick, he turns away, and searches for his team. His living, breathing team. 

When he finds Naruto, the boy’s alone. “Did you see Iruka?” he says to his knees as he tears apart long stems of overgrown, springtime grass. “He, um. I saw what happened to Nej—that kid over there is the Sandaime’s grandson’s teammate. They snuck out to help, I guess.” 

Across the clearing, just barely visible behind two women that look like a mother and an aunt, is a little girl with her arm in a sling and a cut running in a straight line from her hair to her cheekbone. She’s never using that eye again. 

“And the grandson?” Kakashi asks as he takes a seat next to his student on a raised root, but Naruto only shrugs. “Is Sakura working? Where’s Jiraiya?” 

“Yeah. And Jiraiya wanted to be alone,” he says. He lets the grass fall from his fist, drifting in a loose pile across his lap. “Is this my fault?”

“What?” Kakashi says, startled. “Naruto, why—”

“They were after  _ me _ ,” his student says. A shaft of sunlight pierces through the canopy suddenly, lighting up his yellow hair so he looks impressionable and young, like any boy his age should. “Everyone knows it. Now even people my age know it.” 

Kakashi places a hand on his shoulder. “No one’s going to blame you,” he says, which may or may not be true, but fuck anyone who does. “And you can’t blame yourself because a terrorist organization decided to attack us for kicks.”

“But—”

“ _ No _ ,” he says. “Naruto, this isn’t because of you.”

In an almost exact replica of his old teammate, Naruto abruptly twists and wraps his around Kakashi, seeking a kind of comfort no one will provide him first. With a quiet sigh, Kakashi ignores his aching body and reciprocates, because it’s only thing he can offer now. 

 

 

Kiri declares war long before Konoha’s close to recovered. Sakura’s promoted to jounin in a rush, but Naruto, perhaps a little unfairly, isn’t, and Itachi’s thrust back into the field earlier than anticipated. Midway through May, they all go on a joint-mission together with Sasuke as Kakashi’s  _ Suna  _ co-captain, and find themselves in the middle of a chaotic party in the other village’s square less than twelve hours before they’re meant to leave. 

“What the fuck?” Naruto says in well deserved wonderment as Kakashi and his team watch the scene unfold from their place on the center fountain’s edge. A couple his age sit on Sakura’s right, feeding each other balls of fried dough. “I’m hallucinating, right? Tell me I’m hallucinating.”

Shaking her head, Sakura says, “No, this is really happening.”  

What his students are so shocked by, and what admittedly Kakashi and Itachi are shocked by, is the sight of Sasuke and a cluster of Suna citizens a few feet away. She looks more mature than Kakashi’s ever seen her, wearing a pale blue dress (has he ever even seen her a dress?) that falls to her knees and seems to float every time she moves. Her hair, longer than she normally likes, is kept loosely back in a low bun held together with a pin, and she doesn’t bother to hide her newly developed Rinnegan. The Kazekage’s sister drapes an arm across her shoulders. When the girl’s brother nudges her with his elbow, she only shakes her head, and the dark haired boy directly in front of her laughs openly. 

Just a few months ago, she tried to claim she wasn’t two separate people between Suna and Konoha, but Kakashi doesn’t think he believes her anymore. Who bought her the dress? he wonders as Temari suddenly grabs her by the back of it and drags her into the dancing crowd. Do these three ever even argue?

“She’s never this casual with us,” Sakura says, wounded, and sips her water. There’s a sunburn on the back of her neck already formed from earlier that day, bright red in the moonlight. 

Neither Itachi nor Kakashi speak, taking note of the crowd as much as Sasuke, who moves as easily as a local. Though they declared war as Konoha’s ally, this isn’t  _ their  _ war, so the mood isn’t sober, or at least not yet. String lights like the ones the girls have in their living room hang above the square, illuminating the crowd, and a medley of music spills from different bars and restaurants. Sakura and Naruto chatter, unabashed in their gossip. At some point, Sasuke disappears from Temari’s arms to fall into a partnership with a boy who isn’t Kankuro, and the siblings come to draft Kakashi and his team into the party. 

When he extracts himself not long before he plans to call curfew, Sasuke’s on the sidelines of revelry, flushed and talking to her brother. “I probably should’ve warned you,” she says when she catches his eye and flashes guilty sort of smile. There’s a drink in her hand, and he only narrowly stops himself from reminding her that she’s too young, because she’s Suna-nin now, and in Suna the legal drinking age is fourteen. She says, “Sorry about that, Kakashi.”

In the moment she’s not looking, Itachi quirks a brow the same way she does, silently asking if Kakashi understands where she’s getting the newfound energy. “I might’ve appreciated it,” he says as the clock on the other side of the square chimes nine-forty-five. “Is this normal?”

“Pretty much, yeah,” she answers, tucking her hair away from her ear. The sight of the Rinnegan’s no longer as unnerving as it was when she first woke after the Akatsuki’s attack, but he’s so used to seeing her attempting to hide it with her bangs that it’s still a surprise. “Konoha needs to get on this tradition, honestly. It’s definitely the result of knowing you can die any day, so you might as well have fun while you can, you know?” 

Itachi, cautiously, says, “I can understand the merit,” and then adds, “It sounds like a fairly large force if they’ve managed to attack so many villages at once.”

The mission is to track and kill an unknown number of Iwa-nin disrupting civilian villages in the north of the Land of Wind, but details are sparse. “Large is relative,” Sasuke says with a shrug, and sips her ume wine.

“Not necessarily,” Kakashi says, making a note to ask Itachi later what new information she gave him. Behind him, a woman shouts to someone else that they are “done, dammit,” and he sees her stalk away in his peripheral vision. The perfect image of broken-up indignation in a floral mini-dress splattered with something blue. He says, “We have Naruto with us. He’s still a beginner in a lot of ways.”

“You mean he still hasn’t actually killed someone?” Sasuke says. “Yeah, I figured he would’ve mentioned it if he had. If he wants a promotion, he has to prove he can cope eventually, right?”

With a jolt, Kakashi realizes that’s the girl he’s grown to know: carelessly detached, pragmatic, and uncomfortably goal-orientated. It’s not consistent, but it’s undeniably the baseline of her personality. 

In Suna, that’s  _ gone.  _

Shifting his weight, Kakashi says, “I suppose,” though privately, he believes Naruto deserves as much of a childhood as he can manage. Turning to Itachi, he adds, “I’m calling curfew in a few minutes. We need to be up before dawn if we want a head start.” 

“They still have curfew?” Itachi says. 

“Hey, you might be twenty-one, but they have no self-control,” Kakashi says. “Sasuke—”

Her lips quirk into half a smile. “I’ll see you in the morning. Sleep tight, guys.” As he turns away to find his students, he hears her say, “Hey, I’m just a Suna-nin. I can’t override your captain’s orders.” 

When he extracts his students, they don’t quite protest curfew so much as complain that Sasuke doesn’t have to follow it too. “And she sleeps all the time,” Sakura says as they head towards their hotel, “so it’s not like she won’t be tired.” 

Come the next morning, Sasuke isn’t tired, and three days later the joint Suna-Konoha team complete their mission, successfully killing eighteen Iwa-nin without incident or injury. Naruto kills his first enemy, and it’s an unarmed man emerging from a tent in the dark. Kakashi means to talk to him, but the girls steal his attention for most of the trek back to Suna, offering meager wartime support. On the second night Sakura falls asleep with her head on his shoulder. For half a day, Sasuke walks so they’re hand and hand. Tactile therapy at its best. 

When they leave for Suna, she doesn’t come with them. “I’m responsible for the report, remember?” she says, hands slipping into her shorts’ pockets as she leans back against the hotel room’s desk. They’re in the room Itachi and Kakashi shared, baking in the midday sunlight coming through the open window.  “I’ll just be a day or two behind you.”

“Should we wait?” Sakura asks, and the smile Sasuke sends her is so incredibly fond that it’s nearly condescending. 

“Nah, they need you,” she says. “Don’t worry. I can take care of myself.”

Though that doesn’t make any of them feel any better, she’s technically right, so they leave a half hour later. 

Kakashi’s sent out a day after he returns, so it’s a few weeks until they see each other again. When they do, he’s out on the Land of Fire’s coast, helping strengthen a chuunin defensive line, and she arrives as his requested assistance. It hasn’t been long, but she noticeably lost weight again. She keeps her Sharingan activated low level to see clearly. Under her eyes is dark-marked exhaustion so prominent she looks sick. 

“What are they doing to you?” he says when he sees her, but all she does is shrug and drink more water. Her hands shake. “Is it even safe for you to be here right now?”

Again, she shrugs. “Does it really matter?”

“Fuck, yes, it matters,” he says, running his fingers through his hair. He can feel his own dropped weight and has seen his own exhaustion marks, but her appearance is too close to when he first saw her in her bedroom in Suna last September. “I’m the only jounin here right now. I need someone thinking clearly.”

“I’m fine,” she says, more bitingly than usual. A few yards away, a team of chuunin sitting around a weak fire look over without subtly, though they shouldn’t be able to hear. By now, Sasuke’s a local legend as much as he is, and together they’re enough to draw stares and speculation even in a situation like this. 

Kakashi shakes his head. “Sleep. Eat something. Then we’ll talk.”

As a particularly noisy wave crashes against the rocks, scaring a flock of squawking gulls away from the sand, Sasuke breathes out sharply and pivots to face the tap, refilling her water canteen again. “Screw that,” she says as she straightens. “I don’t know how long I’m going to be here. Just debrief me.”

“I asked for backup,” he says, and pats down his pockets until he finds a protein bar. “Eat this at least. What do you mean, you don’t know how long you’re going to be here?” 

Sasuke holds her canteen to her side with her too-sharp elbow and tears open the wrapper. “I’m temp,” she says, and eats half in one bite. Chews, swallows, drinks, and continues, “The chuunin need to be self-sufficient so they can pull you is what I’m guessing. I give it a couple of days before I’m called out.”

With a glance over his shoulder to the chuunin, which forces the curious onlookers to avert their gazes, Kakashi says, “They’re not going to be self-sufficient in just a couple of days, Sasuke.”

“Well, I don’t know what to tell you,” she says. “I’m Konoha’s top floater and on two separate teams right now. This isn’t going to be the first thing I start without finishing.”

It’s only been a few weeks since the war began. Logically, the structure shouldn’t have dissolved this quickly. “Okay,” he says. “Okay. Fine. Well, I’m not giving you a geography lesson. You know how close we are to Kiri. There’s been a few signs of Kiri-nin squads lurking nearby. Water where there shouldn’t be, unexplained ripples. We’ve got two earth users here, and it’s a water user’s home territory. It needs fortification.”

“And they called in two people with affinities to lightning?” Sasuke, raising a brow. “Wow. Brilliant. Right, so what now? Do they need training? Traps? An actual fort?”

Kakashi points upward where he started the beginnings of a treetop base. “Trenches flood,” he says, “and they’re all decent enough. I figured an aerial advantage would help, but if there’s an attack before that’s done, this whole area’s going under water.” 

After a quick survey of wooden walkways and platforms built in the branches, Sasuke says, “It’s good it’s summer. They’re not lighting fires up there.” 

“I’m about ninety-five percent sure none of them are dumb enough to try,” he says, and yawns. Four chuunin hammer away, connecting slanted beams from the tree trunks to the center of the main walkway to create a better support. “Of course, any Kiri-nin can just run up one of those trees, but hopefully one of the earth users will get them before that.” 

“What a ringing endorsement of their skills,” she says, and sags her weight against a tree. “Where’s the nearest place to wash off?” 

A breeze sweeps off the sea, swirling coarse sand around their ankles. Kakashi has a cut on his knee covered by his pant leg, but the grit still finds its way to embed itself in the open skin. After he directs her to the nearest freshwater pool, she slips her canteen into her pack, removes a change of clothes, and tells him to watch her stuff. “They better not attack in the next fifteen minutes,” she says in a mumble, and leaves without waiting for his answer.

When the attack finally comes, it’s two nights later and most of the chuunin are in the canopy finishing the base. Kakashi and Sasuke, who paused long enough in their help to nap between two roots below, wake abruptly in the same moment; he throws a kunai, embedding it in an older man’s forehead, and she releases a bolt of lighting that goes clean through a girl’s stomach. 

The attack force is small, numbering seven, and only ordinary jounin, but that’s still enough to overwhelm a team of chuunin. Briefly, he and Sasuke exchange a glance and come to silent agreement that this is a problem they’re handling on their own. 

In an instant, they both identify the captain, a woman short dark hair and a jagged scar across her cheek, as she materializes from a crashing wave. The man Kakashi killed was the co-captain, he sees from the insignia on the sleeve. As a young man Sasuke’s age runs to help the still-living girl with the hole in her body, he tosses two shuriken and kills them. In the same moment, Sasuke shifts her eyes into the Mangekyo Sharingan, disappears, and reappears at the captain’s back. The woman dies from well aimed bo swipe to her ear. 

A wind kunai flies from the treetop, whistling as it passes Kakashi’s side, and strikes an approaching Kiri-nin in the shoulder. Sasuke gets the man before Kakashi can, releasing a burst of lightning needles as he stumbles from the momentum. The final Kiri-nin’s almost to the nearest tree, but Kakashi kills him first with a Chidori through his back. Within few minutes, the attack is over. He kicks the man away, who collapses heavily onto the roots, and calls for the chuunin to take care of burial before going to the water to wash away the blood. The sound of birds rattles in his head and light dances phantom-like across his vision, but he ignores it all and scrumbs the man’s insides off his hand. 

Meanwhile, Sasuke stands still in the surf, leaning on her bo and breathing heavily. 

“Can you make it up there?” he asks when he’s finished, nodding towards the base. She shakes her head. “Right. Can I move you? Good. Are you going to tell me how you disappeared, or is that waiting until morning?”

He maneuvers her to lean against him before collapsing her bo. For now, all she mumbles is “Rinnegan,” which is answer enough, and lets him help her on his back. The captain lies dead on the sand with her neck at an unnatural angle, lapped at by the waves. 

Most of the chuunin are on the ground level handling the dead by the time they make it to the top, but those that remain watch them warily. “That was messed up,” he hears Mako, the youngest here, say to Tomoe, one of the two earth users, who readily agrees. Though Kakashi and Sasuke hear them, they also pretend not to, and fall asleep together against the trunk of a tree like this is the worst battle they’ll face. 

 

 

Today is the twenty-first of June, the longest day of the year, and nearly nine with the sun still shining cheerfully overhead because this is Shimo, where the day doesn’t end until midnight. It’s gorgeous here, with a shallow river cheerfully bubbling, wildflowers bending in the breeze, perfect white clouds drifting across a seemingly endless blue sky—but Kakashi sees none of it, because the ground is littered with Oto-nin corpses, and Sasuke is. And  _ Sasuke. _

Sakura’s on her knees in front of her, holding her face between her hands. “I need you to focus on me, okay?” she says, voice steady. Just out of view, Itachi and Naruto stand side by side, hovering. Itachi’s eyes are wide, and his arms folded. Naruto’s body shakes. So does Sasuke’s. Sakura’s saying, “In, out. In, out. Breathe, Sasuke. Eyes on me. In, hold it. Out slowly. Okay, good. Do you know where you are?”

“Shimo,” Sasuke answers, but she doesn’t sound certain. Fingerprint bruises form on her throat where the Oto-nin grabbed her, and she’s soaked through from falling into the river. There’s blood on her chest from where Kakashi pulled the boy away from her.

Again, Sakura says, “Okay, good,” and asks, “What month and year is it?”

As Sasuke correctly answers June one-oh-one after a pause that lasts too long, Kakashi turns away to collect spare weapons and speed up the process of leaving. When Naruto and Itachi join him, the effort all around is half hearted as they keep most of their attention on the girls—how old is she? why are they here? does she know who she (Sakura) is? No, Sasuke, eyes here.

Then, suddenly, with a sound that’s not quite a sob, he hears her say, “Get me out of here, please just me out of here, Sakura—”

“Yeah, yeah, okay. Close your eyes.”

Sakura stands, and takes the other girl with her, so Sasuke’s pressed tight against her side with her face in her shoulder, eyes closed. With a sharp look and a jerk of her head, Sakura tells the rest of them that it’s time to go, as if they need the message. Naruto goes to speak, but quiets when Kakashi glances his way. Whatever’s going on over there is just an illusion of stability. He doesn’t know what will happen if she hears someone else’s voice yet. 

For awhile now, Kakashi’s thought that there’s something  _ wrong  _ with Sasuke’s behavior, but this cements it. He expected a flashback if they ever encountered Oto-nin in the field, but he hadn’t expected Sasuke to only try to attack once  _ he  _ intercepted the fight. 

Sasuke doesn’t open her eyes until they’re far from the battleground, and no one speaks until they find an old farmhouse to hide out in for the night, and Sakura finally explains that the Godaime didn’t remove Orochimaru’s genjutsu. Instead, she reversed it. Apparently she neglected to mention to her student that, technically, that’s also a form of genjutsu torture which means that, technically, she did the same thing he did and hoped for the best possible outcome. At that point, she didn’t even have the excuse that they were at war. 

After the kids are asleep or at least pretending to be, Kakashi steps outside for air with Itachi. “I’m sorry,” he says before he can stop himself. “I’m just. I’m so fucking sorry.”

“Why are you apologizing to me?” Itachi asks, bewildered. A lightning bug flies past, illuminating the brown of his eyes before fading again. 

“Because she won’t accept it if I say it to her,” Kakashi answers, scuffing his foot against the ground, “and your only condition to an illegal mission was to make sure the village kept your kid sister safe. Look at well Konoha did that.”

Itachi grimaces. “I blame more people than I care to admit,” he says, “but you are not one of them. And while I think...this was done with the best intentions, it has its consequences.”

“Now that she knows it’s only going to get worse.” Kakashi takes a deep breath, exhales slowly, and doesn’t think about Sakura coaching Sasuke to do the same. 

“‘Take care of her’ wasn’t my original request,” Itachi says, looking at the overgrown ground. “I asked that they see she was adopted, but they insisted they couldn’t promise what wasn’t a guarantee. In retrospect, they probably didn’t want to last Uchiha in Konoha to lose her name.”

In retrospect, at least one person who signed that contract probably hoped she’d die before a Uchiha caused anymore trouble. “Well, no one can blame you for trying,” Kakashi says. At least Sasuke, through all of this, secured her own justice. “Did you notice? That something was wrong.” 

With a look over his shoulder towards the closed front door, her brother says, “I thought perhaps. In Suna. But, no. We saw each other, but not so frequently that I can claim to know her.” 

Naruto doesn’t her that well either. If Sakura noticed, she selectively ignored the behavioral discrepancy. But Kakashi noticed. Sasuke’s reaction to trauma has never been to simply ignore it—though maybe that’s what she does in Suna, tucks it away into a part of herself she sequestered off for home. From their first meeting, he learned that her coping mechanism is a very unhealthy display of apathy. Realistically, she didn’t show signs of recovery until after her chuunin exams when she and Sakura moved in together.

Knowing that, it hadn’t made much sense that just a few months after her escape, she was able to banter with him about poor life choices at four in the morning. 

“Do you have any idea what she’s leaving for tomorrow?” he says, watching the lightning bugs so he doesn’t have to look at Itachi, who resembles his sister more in the darkness than he does during the day. “And don’t ‘it’s classified’ me,” he adds. “I know it’s not real mission.” 

After a short silence, Itachi says, “She’s meeting with a few other team members to intercept the Kiri Council meeting. Undercover. We only just received the intel on our last mission.”

“And didn’t think to pass it on to get official orders?”

“It was safer not to risk any potential complications.”

What he means, Kakashi’s guessing, is that no one wanted to risk receiving the order that they leave the Council alone. Breaking the rules isn’t ordinary behavior for Itachi. Even with her brain shot, Sasuke still managed to be a bad influence. Kakashi asks, “Why aren’t you going along?”

“We couldn’t have more than one person leave a secondary team at a time,” he answers, “and Sasuke is the captain. She needs to be the one there.”

“Yeah, but is it  _ safe? _ ” Sending the girl who can electrify her body, who just had the fundamental basis of her reality tilted on its axis, into a wetlands for a high profile, unsanctioned mission is a bad idea. 

“I’ve seen them work together,” he says warily. “They’re very close. The teammates she’ll be with can talk her down if they don’t already have a plan in place to handle a situation like this.”

Though Kakashi wants to ask who her co-captain is, he refrains. He knows too much already. “That’s good,” he says. “Do you think it will work? Honestly. Sasuke’s never even been on an official undercover mission before, and now there’s this.”

“Kakashi,” Itachi says. “We met for two years without anyone in Konoha learning about it on their own. And you think she can’t manage an undercover mission?”  

With something nearing a laugh, Kakashi says, “Well, when you put it like that.” More than that, he knows now that the Godaime had her gathering evidence against Shimura, and she did that without discovery too. “Anyway,” he continues, “we should head inside. I think we’re safe enough here that we won’t need an active watch so long as we set traps on the entry points.” 

Itachi agrees, and follows him back into the darkened farmhouse, where Sakura’s curled asleep on the couch and past the cracked open bedroom door, Kakashi spies Sasuke and Naruto lying back-to-back under the covers. That leaves the two couches free, so after setting a few traps and with a nod goodnight, Kakashi takes one while Itachi takes the other. The darkness weighs down heavy across Kakashi’s back and his last thought before he falls asleep is that he hopes Sasuke doesn’t do anything rash. 

 

 

The eastern front weakens to near non-existence in late July after Sasuke drafts Team Kakashi to assist in a dual strike against the Land of Water’s capital and Kirigakure, and she kills the Mizukage with a cheap genjutsu trick and stab to the chest. “It wasn’t as hard as you’d think,” she tells Hisakawa Hitomi, who he hasn’t seen since the day Team Seven survived the Forest of Death, when she and the other half of the ANBU strike force meet several miles outside of Kiri. “But I had a solid team, so you know. What was the security like?”

“Not as hard as you’d think,” Hitomi answers, and smacks a woman with sharp features and frizzy brown curls upside the back of the head for saying hey, credit the little people. She joined the ANBU the year Kakashi left, when she was Sasuke’s age, and she hardly looks a day older, somehow.

Altogether, their numbers equal fourteen, and it should be a good sign that they enter the village several days later with that number intact and news that the eastern front is in shambles. Instead, they return to find Shimura Danzo dead. 

Later, after Tsunade decides to keep Sakura at her side, to send Kakashi and Naruto to the southern front and the ANBU to a series of new locations, and lets Sasuke leave more permanently for Suna, Jiraiya worms his way into Kakashi’s apartment. “Now I don’t know how she did it,” he says, making himself comfortable on the couch with a nice mug of coffee, “but come on. We both know Uchiha killed Shimura.”

“No,” Kakashi says, sinking into the chair across the coffee table from his friend. “I think they all did. Or most of them anyway. I should’ve known. They were acting squirrely.”

“Yeah, but she instigated it,” Jiraiya says, motioning dangerously with the coffee mug over the throw rug. Late afternoon light slips through the main window, highlighting every wrinkle in his face. “No one else there has the motivation for it.”

“That’s not like her,” says Kakashi. “Something would’ve happened to kickstart it.”

Jiraiya raises his brows. “Hey, I told you years ago,” he says, much too smugly. “So maybe Itachi really is about as vicious as a teddy bear, but she still looked me dead in the eye when she was twelve and promised to kill me.  _ I  _ don’t doubt she could instigate it.”

“Didn’t she only do that because you irresponsibly left Naruto alone to fuck a prostitute?” Jiraiya’s mouth pinches. “Yeah, and you didn’t do it again, did you?”

Before answering, he takes a long sip of coffee. Then he says, “The kid’s a handful, what can I say? But the point still stands. She’s more than capable, and she’s convincing from what I hear.”

Kakashi shifts, resting his ankles on the coffee table. “Why are you trying to convince me that she’s involved?” he asks. 

“Well, because I’m right,” Jiraiya answers, as though it’s obvious, “but I can’t say it to anyone else. Tsunade’s going to pretend it didn’t happen, and that’s fine—bastard deserved it—but I don’t want to start trouble for the kid.” 

“What?” That, if possible, is more unexpected than Shimura’s death. “You don’t even like her.” 

“It’s not that I  _ dislike  _ her,” he says. “I just don’t get why everyone pretends she isn’t nuts.”

“She’s not crazy, Jiraiya.”

“She’s a little crazy.”

Though Sasuke’s certainly not crazy, she’s also not stable, and Kakashi can’t argue the difference in that for long. “Regardless,” he says begrudgingly, “you’re still wrong. People have been saying that about her for years.”

Jiraiya finishes his coffee and places his mug down on the table. “And yet,” he says, “from what I hear, she still managed to convince a bunch of jounin in a sketchy basement that the village horror story is innocent with no actual evidence. Now that’s crazy  _ and  _ scary.”

Maybe he’s right, just a bit, that Sasuke would be capable of instigating the leader of the ANBU’s assassination. In the basement on the day Tsunade announced to a select few jounin that Uchiha Itachi is innocent, Sasuke dissipated the general atmosphere of disbelief with a short, mostly fabricated story of how she came to learn this for herself. First and foremost, she had to convince Tsunade to believe her. During the chuunin exams, Kakashi watched from the position of an ordinary jounin as she mingled with government officials and delegates from other villages. Somehow, she convinced the Suna Council to give her a leadership position in the Kazekage’s rescue mission when she could hardly stand without shaking. 

Regardless of the many rumors about her mental state, people still listen to her. Kakashi, fleetingly, wonders what it would be like to have that degree of power without conscious awareness of it. 

“You don’t need to worry about her for a while,” he says, collecting himself. “The west is about to turn into the main front, so she’s basically moving to Suna for now.”

“You’re joking,” Jiraiya says, but sadly, Kakashi’s not.

Two days later, he says goodbye to her at the halfway point between Konoha and Suna, and doesn’t see her again until the end of war. 

She’s a few weeks into nineteen and looks it, which makes him feel just oh-so-old, still dressed for the front in desert colors with her hair sand dusted and wind-whipped. There’s a ratty bandage wrapped from her elbow to her wrist. For Konoha, the war’s been over for days, but not for Suna.

“I’ve got to go soon,” she says even as he passes her a plate of leftover takeout. “But thanks— _ wow _ did I miss real food. Anyway, I’m really only here to deliver the terms to the Godaime, but I have to be there for the surrender. How’re you doing? How’s Naruto?”

In the past few years, she’s seen her brother and Sakura, but Naruto and Kakashi kept mainly to the southern and home fronts. Kakashi blinks, still attempting to align the image of her he had in his head—the girl forced to grow up too fast, all twiggy limbs and pale skin and eyes bright with exhaustion—with the young woman in front of him, and says, “Naruto’s getting a drink with your old classmates. He’s doing really well, got lauded as a war hero already after a stint we pulled a couple years ago.”

She grins. Afternoon sunlight outlines her from behind, and he wonders if she can see the age captured in the corners of his eyes. “Yeah, I heard about that,” she says, sipping at her second glass of water. “I saw Itachi a week later. And you?” The fan in the corner rattles and outside the open window, two sparrows chirp in conversation. 

“About the same as usual,” he answers, which is more or less true. “Led a lot campaigns. Found out the Land of Waves has decent literature—”

“Don’t be modest,” she says, cutting him off. “I heard about the Akanami Run too. And that wasn’t even from a Konoha-nin.”

With a quirked smile, he says, “You’re one to talk. That attack on the caves made it far.”

“Only because Iwa doesn’t want to admit they got beat out by their own signature technique,” she says. “What else?”

There’s a lot he can talk about—the time they lost half a regiment to a natural flash flood, that Genma close to died half a year ago, or how Jiraiya published his first legitimate novel that no ordinary man or woman will be embarrassed to read. Instead he just says, “Apparently Kurenai appointed me her son’s second godfather. I learned that one yesterday.”

“That’s sweet?” she says, as confused as he is. “Did she ever make it back onto the front or was she off because of motherhood or whatever?”

Kakashi catches her up as well as he can on the comings and goings of war: Kurenai took control of the coastal border so she could routinely go home, Gai and his old students were in the south, Asuma’s team spent six months in the Land of Sound routing out remaining Oto-nin, and, well, she already knows about Sakura, who flitted between regions depending on who needed a medic. Itachi spent the majority of the last few years behind an ANBU mask, and their main forces were concentrated in the north. Even when Sasuke went back on loan to Konoha, she didn’t go far from the western front. 

“What about you?” he asks when he’s finished and she mumbles to her sushi about being so disconnected. “I’ve heard rumors, but that’s not reliable.”

“I feel like you, first of all,” she says. “I have wearing sunglasses outside of Suna because of this stupid eye or people just recognize me on sight. How do you stand it?”

“Unhappily.”

She smiles again, small and quick, before continuing, “So that sucks. Uh. I was on leave for my eighteenth birthday last year, which I ended up spending in this random village in the Land of Lightning learning how to sail a sampan. Some Iwa Council member literally asked Temari to marry him for ‘politics.’ My ANBU team spent a couple weeks in the Land of Fire not that long ago, which was nice. And I discovered a few places even weirder than the one we ended up in with the Rinnegan. What’s wrong?”

For a moment, he’s confused, but the question isn’t terribly surprising. After all, she’s always been able to read him better than most. “Nothing,” he says. “You seem good, Sasuke.”

He learned years ago that there’s something about Suna that steadies her, but this is degree of hyperactivity would be unusual even for Naruto. Her right shoulder twitches in what might be a shrug. “Well, we did just win a war,” she says. “Why aren’t you out celebrating like everyone else? I thought you’d be a lot harder to find.”

“I’m heading out for that in a couple of hours,” he says. “A group of us are going to Kurenai’s since it’s not like she can go out drinking with a three-year-old. No one would mind if you drop by,” he adds. “Naruto will be there. It’s his birthday next week.”  

“Oh, speaking of Naruto,” she says, twisting around in her chair and stretching for her pack, “can you give him something for me? Because I’d like that—” She drags it to her side and disappears behind the table, fumbling with the straps and zippers. “—but we’re officially convening for Iwa’s surrender in two days, and they basically demanded that I’m there.”

As she straightens, a brown paper bag crinkled shut in her hands, he says, “I don’t need to be worried, do I?” Iwa-nin can be extreme when someone hurts their pride. After the Third War ended, they called for a number of Konoha arrests under the charge of “war crimes,” Kakashi’s included, but Minato managed to dissuade them. 

“I don’t think so,” Sasuke says. “But I’m wanted as a Konoha representative, so there’s a chance the demand actually came from Kiri. It’s all right though. The Godaime wrote into her terms that they can’t touch me.”

That isn’t as reassuring as she obviously meant it to be. “Okay,” he says, and lets the subject lie. “So what’s in the bag?”

“Iwa’s frontline rations, actually,” she says, pushing the bag towards him. “It’s instant ramen, and supposedly good. We get protein bars and they get  _ ramen. _ I thought he’d appreciate my indignation.”

Even Kakashi, who doesn’t like ramen, is insulted when he unfurls the bag and finds a cheerfully colored, store bought product sitting there. Konoha’s frontlines force turned into an army of skeletons because of poor rationing while Iwa-nin ate like they were on a normal mission. Looking back to her, he says, “I’ll pass it on. You should get your arm checked out before you leave at least. I’m surprised Tsunade didn’t heal it.” 

She glances at the bandages like she forgot they were there. “It’s already mostly healed,” she says. “I caught the Godaime in the middle of a meeting, so she was in a rush. But I should head out. I want to buy a few liters of water before I leave. My regiment was running low already a couple of days ago. I can’t carry a lot, but anything helps.”

“I’ve got a few in the fridge,” Kakashi says, standing and removing her empty plate before she can move to do it herself. “Just refill the one that’s almost empty. The one thing we never did have to ration around here is water.”

“Yeah, lucky you,” she says, and rolls her eyes. 

Before she leaves, she refills the liter bottle with water from the tap, and rearranges her pack to fit three. Her overshirt, embroidered at the sleeve hems with a Suna general’s stripes, and pants are both too big. Though he wants to, he doesn’t ask if she’s returning when negotiations are finished, or if she’s staying in Suna, nor if the rumors are true about her and the Kazekage. He wants her back in Konoha for reasons that are entirely selfish, all because seven years ago Umino Iruka walked into the corner bar to ask that Kakashi allow her to graduate even if she failed. More than likely, his blatant favoritism was inevitable after that; Sakura had her parents and friends to help look after her and Naruto was too much of his parents’ son with Jiraiya to act as secondary support, but Sasuke was always a distorted form of Kakashi’s past made human.

That must be a type of narcissism, really. 

They hug goodbye, war-skinny arms wrapped around war-skinny bodies. “Tell everyone I say hello,” she says in the last moment, already halfway out the door. “I’ll see them soon, okay?”

“I will,” he says, and, “Stay safe,” before he watches through the kitchen window as she walks three steps into the summer air and disappears.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I enjoyed writing this part way more than writing the first, and I don't know why. Thanks for reading!

**Author's Note:**

> I'll post part two in a couple of days. It's already finished. Also, I decided to do the thing with Rin because Obito actually died in this world.


End file.
